


glasnost

by campholmes



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: 80s Soviet Russia AU, Butch Katya, F/F, Gritty & Nasty, Smoking, Synth Pop Galore!, Vodka, hot butch woman fisting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-06
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2018-11-28 18:41:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 44,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11423847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/campholmes/pseuds/campholmes
Summary: Katya can predict a new Chairman of the Presidium like nobody’s business, almost down to the day they’re appointed, can pick out a woman down to lie in her bed in a crowd of hundreds, can plan for a so-called factory inspection from just a pull in her gut. She can see wage cuts and wage hikes on the horizon weeks in advance, can feel them tingling in her fingers when she knows there will be more rubles to stuff in her shoebox.(Katya lives in a small Russian town in 1989. Her biggest dream? Collect enough lucky rubles to bust her ass on over to the USA, with or without her dream woman by her side.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hey! here’s my new project, cause i totally need to be writing more stuff. BUT this is something i should have been writing months ago, a complete labor of love. this fic combines all of my favorite things: dismal soviet aesthetic, lesbian love, and butch katya. you’re welcome. 
> 
> there are large amounts of references in this fic- maybe you will learn something but more likely you will just be confused. feel free to have google open up in another tab to help ease you along as well as to enrich your understanding of the story. i had at least 21 tabs open at any given time while writing this chapter, so prepare for a history lesson. [inspired by this look.](https://fleursverts.tumblr.com/post/162537694733)
> 
> the Russian/references/anything could be wrong as i am only human. that being said, it is fiction, so please don't take it too seriously. nothing matters!

Katya throws her bag down in the doorway, heaves it over her shoulder and just lets it fall on the creaky wood, makes a beeline for the bottle of vodka she’d left on the table from breakfast. She doesn’t usually drink like the pot-bellied, stinky men at the factory that sneak entire bottles in under the not-so-watchful eyes of the guards, but sometimes she’ll be having a long day, a long week, a long year, and she’ll need a good stress reliever once she gets home. Or directly before she leaves, immediately after breakfast. Or both.

She swings the window open and unbuttons the flaps on her blue jumpsuit, yanks it down to her waist so that she’s just in a sweaty, stained tank top that was once maybe white. Her bra strap has been falling down her shoulder all day, and she’s almost too relieved to pull it back up after hours of squirming beneath it. It’s autumn, finally, and some yellow leaves are blowing in through the creaky window with the water-stained wood pane. 

She cranks the radio on, careful to let the dial position itself with her fingers so that she can get the best signal. The news is the usual, dismal and stupid, and she wouldn’t dare say that to anyone but herself, in her own head, until she can dig up the cash to straighten herself up and ship out. Quite literally.

Under her bed is all the money she’s ever saved in all her life. She never looks at it, when she stuffs more banknotes and coins inside the shoebox she does it with eyes squeezed tight. Someday she’ll face it, open the overflowing box and count all the change, but today, a fall day with heavy hanging branches and dizzying clouds, is not that day. She’s on her way to drunk, and she knows that Sasha will come over from next door to listen to records with her in about an hour, until they both fall asleep in Katya’s matching faded blue armchairs in the front room.

When Katya’s vision is swimming and she’s done letting the mug of vodka slide down her throat with ease, the knock at her door shakes her more awake and she stumbles her way over. It’s getting dark, and cold, and she shuts the window. The wood doesn’t always sit properly, and in the freezing winter it’s not ideal, but she’s less affected by the cold than most women. And proud of it. She loves to cuddle a woman in the freezing cold, too, but she hasn’t had one back to her dreary apartment in months, nor does she think that she’ll be having one anytime soon. It’s just a feeling. 

Her feelings are usually right. Katya can predict a new Chairman of the Presidium like nobody’s business, almost down to the day they’re appointed, can pick out a woman down to lie in her bed in a crowd of hundreds, can plan for a so-called factory inspection from just a pull in her gut. She can see wage cuts and wage hikes on the horizon weeks in advance, can feel them tingling in her fingers when she knows there will be more rubles to stuff in her shoebox.

And she knows the feeling, when she’s about to get some. She hasn’t had it in months. She prays that this one, singular time she’s wrong. 

Sasha is waiting behind her door, with a bag Katya assumes is filled with sandwiches and little cakes and probably more alcohol, clinking bottles and rustling plastic. Sasha has light blonde hair chopped short, too, and many people mistake them for sisters, Katya’s sure that even more people would if she was remotely Sasha’s height or had Sasha’s soft, pale skin. Katya burns herself in the sun every day of the summer, she doesn’t care to spend what she could be saving on sunscreen, and she thinks that she looks more alive for it. Sasha, however, is tall and dreamy, a stretched-out, rouge-wearing, fashionable Katya, who’s pulling off her thick socks and letting her jumpsuit fall to the floor.

Sasha laughs a deep giggle at how Katya’s foot catches in the thick fabric, how she stumbles and grabs at the peeling floral wallpaper. Some of it detaches and falls to the floor and Katya immediately sneezes at the dust. It isn’t the first time she’s had a tiny panic moment about how her life is falling apart at an achingly slow pace, but this time she’s crossing to get a cigarette from the side table, lighting it with a match and dropping the hot wood stick into the sink.

Katya feels damn lucky that she has a best friend right next door, a best friend that she can wear a dirty work shirt and underwear in front of, a best friend she can smoke with on her matching armchairs and talk endless shit about the day.

And then she feels a little guilty for still wanting a woman so bad, too. She’s good the way she is, she doesn’t need to worry about another person just for the perks of sex and long hair to yank on. But she squashes that guilt like a dusty beetle, lets herself snuggle into the blanket left on her assigned chair from last night, lets Sasha pass her a sandwich wrapped in an ancient embroidered napkin across the wood table with the lamp. 

Katya is getting a little sick of lunchmeat and cheese, though, and she can’t help but be disappointed when she realizes that the sandwiches Sasha’s made are just that. There’s not much either of them can do, though, it’s what’s available and the collectivized farms don’t spit out much more variety. There are a few private farms around town and the number is growing steadily, but that food must be going to the big cities where there are restaurants and government workers, healthy meals and less cans you need to slam on the counter to get them to pop open.

They sit eating in silence, and Katya wants to cry, a little. The sun is setting, and the lamp is casting long, lonely shadows across the room. The door to her bedroom is ajar, looming next to where the TV has piles of books and letters stacked atop it. She hasn’t cleaned in months but for a quick dusting with a dirty sock every couple weeks, a quick sweep when she can feel dirt stacking up beneath her bare toes. She’s the corner apartment and when the wind blows it hits the living room with heavy noises that make the radio crackle. It’s crackling now, playing old tunes that Katya can vaguely remember her mother crying almost comically to at their old, heavy wooden dining room table.

That table had been an heirloom, but she couldn’t lug it to her apartment when her mother died, and she certainly didn’t have any other family to ask to take it temporarily. It’s all for the better, though, that she doesn’t have to worry about it getting stolen or lost once she leaves. Most of the things she’s left behind over the years have been for the better, she’s made herself obsolete in waiting and anticipation.

Last year she’d bit the bullet and sold everything of value stuffed in her tiny closet. She hadn’t looked at it in years and she’d ended up passing some of the prettier clothes on to Sasha, but selling the gold chains and embellished earrings for as much as she could wrangle on a trip to St. Petersburg in the summer heat. And then she’d hooked up with a gangly French woman in her pathetic excuse for a hotel room, had walked around the city in her best jumpsuit the next day, sitting in parks and watching students pass her by. 

It had cemented her decision to leave, had ensured that she would be on the next possible sneak out, the absolute soonest whisper like the ones that would travel in her tiny group of friends in secondary school, after a schoolmate had disappeared without a word. It was never too dramatic, the tiny family of three that had slipped under the cracks and around the watchful eyes of the KGB. But it started the whispers, and it gave Katya reason to hoard the box that held her newest pair of brown boots the next year, to pick up every coin found on the ground and to keep all of the rubles her mother ever passed her with shaking fingers over breakfast in the mornings.

When she was young, she dreamt of stamping out her patronymic, damning her father for eternity the absolute minute she arrived in the shiny, evil United States after stowing away on a huge ship from France, or England. Now she doesn’t mind it, lets the Petrovna sit quietly slotted in the middle, her sights set on something more serious, more tangible than the potential meaning of a name and her mother’s desperate, sobbing instructions at the maternity house in Moscow to add Pyotr’s name inside her lonely baby’s. 

Something more serious in that, with or without anyone else, she’d be gone by thirty-five. She’d be settled, maybe hidden, maybe in the mountains or far into the countryside, but in the United States, where she could live without constant work hanging over her head and maybe a woman or two or as many as they leave her. Maybe a cow, maybe some land, but mostly the freedom and wide open space, the smell of fresh, healthy air and a home of her own that isn’t a dilapidated and faded, unbearably gray apartment building in the middle of snowy brown nowhere.

And she’s running out of time. She’s twenty-nine with little to show for it, the same job she’s had since she was nineteen, the same apartment she’s had since the very same year. She’d begged Sasha to move in next to her once the space opened up, had helped her lug all of her belongings up in the elevator and had slept over in her tiny twin bed the same night when she was anxious about how the floors creaked. 

And now she’s been living here for ten years, her shit has been simultaneously piling up and being sold for better purposes, none of it is permanent but for the flimsy walls that she can hear Sasha and Shea getting freaky behind, the window above her bed that she leans out of into the cool air, smoking into the early early morning, watching the mice dart across the empty lot, matted stray cats following them, hissing. The clouds always hang so low, low enough that she feels like they’re settling on her skin, tiny dewdrops on each of the hairs on her arms. 

She’s been aging here, her crow’s feet deepening, her hair graying a little bit at the temples. It’s so blonde that she was only able to tell while studying herself in the mirror late one night, but she’s not a kid anymore, she doesn’t have thirty-five ahead of her far in the distance, it’s coming up in a small matter of years and all she can think of is how her mother had wasted away in the tiny cottage, lonely and sorry for herself. She’s going to waste away in the United States, thank you very much, where she can’t be forcibly whipped by the government to break her back over a power drill all day long.

Sasha has been alone for months while Shea is in St. Petersburg, dancing or acting or whatever, exactly, she does. Katya isn’t ashamed to say that she’s jealous of their relationship. She is, she wants a woman. Sasha will look off to the side sometimes, out the window into the dark night, or the bright sun, and Katya can see Shea in her eyes. 

Katya wants breasts in her hands, big wide eyes looking up at her, pretty moans and soft skin and long hair on the pillow. She wants a woman that wants to help her wash the dishes, a woman that will let her hold her in bed as she falls asleep. 

“Are you alright?” Sasha has been watching her for a while. Katya is too transparent, every single emotion she feels is reflected immediately on her face and she curses it vehemently in her head, nods and gestures that Sasha can turn the TV on. She shakes her head and positions herself so that she’s kneeling on her chair, eyes boring into the side of Katya’s head.

“I’m fine!” Katya insists. And then a warm hand is on her bare arm, giving her goosebumps. She can’t help but relax under it. “Okay, okay. I’m horny.”

“Sure,” Sasha turns back to position herself normally. Katya rolls her eyes privately in her own head where Sasha’s ever-vigilant eyes can’t see. They fall asleep under blankets right there, the radio still crackling with soft voices, and Katya dreams of big big oceans with planes flying quickly over them, quickly enough that nobody would even know she was gone.

-

Her car won’t start thirty percent of the time, the gratification on driving herself to work a few times a week is almost nonexistent and she needs to take the train quite often in resignation, as the car sits mockingly on the cracked pavement of the lot. She spends hours working on it, twisting wires and improvising, and she’s got it to the point of being pretty reliable, but she isn’t perfect and there’s only so much she can do before scrapping it, buying a new one. Which isn’t even close to coming to be an option.

Today it’s working, though, she got it to start at the first yank, and she cranks her window down in quick circles, lights a cigarette and pulls out on the scratchy gravel. This early in the morning is always busy, people walking to work, pails and bags with lunches and hats pulled down far, hands already dirty. Katya loves driving even when it does make her anxious, the roads full of pedestrians and buses and bikes, not to mention the cars that don’t follow any of the road signs. She loves to bellow out her window at her coworkers, pull over to give them rides, loves the chaos of an early morning and the satisfaction of a morning cigarette.

Before she knows it she’s screeching to a halt, the car bouncing so violently that she’s worried it’ll die, in order to stop for a woman that’s standing at the edge of the road, cautiously wondering when to cross. Katya sticks her hand out the window and beckons her forward, and the woman squints at her through the dirty windshield. 

“‘Cmon, you can cross!” Katya yells over the honking behind her. The woman looks nervously to the other side of the road, where the cars are whizzing by. Katya’s a dumbass, she’ll never make it across. “No, hop in!” 

The woman has her long blonde hair in two thick braids, falling over her big breasts, she’s wearing a button up and a thick jacket and her cheeks are red in the cold, and Katya watches her take a moment to consider before she’s jumping over the curb, pulling the squeaky hinge to open the door, and then she smells like cows and she’s in the passenger seat of Katya’s car.

“Hi, hi, you’re not going to kill me I hope,” she’s out of breath from how she was running. Her breasts are heaving and Katya quickly averts her eyes back to the road, she’s driving again and she doesn’t want to crash them both. The woman taps her on the shoulder.

“Hey,” Katya looks over to her again. She has the longest lashes, endless freckles, her blonde curls are falling out of her braids. She’s _pretty_ pretty, like Moscow pretty, TV pretty, and Katya’s eyes trace down to where her hand is still on Katya’s jacket. She pulls it away. “No, I’m not going to kill you.”

The woman laughs lightly, and Katya can see that she’s still a bit nervous. Katya wonders if she smells. She didn’t have time to shower this morning and she’d deemed herself respectable enough for a day of work in the dim light of her bathroom but she hardly thinks that that counts. 

“Well, I’m glad. Trixie,” the woman says, holds out her hand. Katya sticks her cigarette back between her lips and shakes it firmly, looks into her eyes, she’s spent years, _decades_ flirting with women, and she isn’t going to stray from her tried and true methods now. Not when this is easily the most beautiful woman she’s ever seen. And will ever see. Katya’s confident in calling that right now.

“Katya. Lovely to meet you, pretty. Where’re you headed?” Katya grins at her, takes her cigarette back in hand. Trixie is smirking back at her, and Katya’s stomach is a little on-edge. It’s never this easy. She forces herself to shut down a little bit.

“To the store, turn left up here,” Trixie points past Katya’s face, and through the heavy smell of farm that clings to her clothes Katya can smell the faintest vanilla, flowers, cheap perfume that she can’t help but imagine Trixie spreading on her wrists in the morning to go to the store before walking back to her family’s new privatized farm. Trixie might have some money, and the possibility alone is making Katya’s hips shift down into her seat.

“Oh, hey, you wanna drink?” Katya jerks her thumb to the back seat where an opened, half-empty bottle of vodka is rolling on the soft blue upholstery. Trixie giggles, twists her body deliciously (even through layers) to pick it up, unscrews the lid and chugs enthusiastically, pulling a screeching laugh from Katya’s gut. Trixie’s lips turn up around the mouth of the bottle, she pulls it back before she’s laughing and sputtering some out all over the dashboard. Katya pulls into the parking lot, swerves into an empty spot near the front door, and Trixie leans across the armrest and presses a soft, stinging kiss to Katya’s greasy cheek, gripping her forearm. Katya can feel her skin heat up beneath her lips. 

“Thanks for the ride,” she breathes against Katya’s skin. Her breath smells sweet and hot, like vodka but also somehow fresh, floral and soft. Katya would love to taste her. It’s fall and she needs it. “Maybe I’ll see you again sometime?”

Trixie pulls back, leans on the armrest, she’s smiling and blushing, too, and Katya feels less insecure about her own. Trixie’s blush is beautiful, a little heavier in spots because of how the skin of her cheeks is windblown. 

“Sure you will,” Katya puts out her cigarette and pulls a napkin and a pen out from under the armrest, she’s going to be late for work and she doesn’t care, they wouldn’t fire their most competent worker and everyone knows it. She scribbles her number and her name down, sticks it in the jacket pocket that’s situated over Trixie’s left breast, and wraps fingers around her braid for a second. “Call me if you ever need a ride.”

Trixie laughs a big, full yell, and then she’s climbing out the door, her brown work boots clunking on the pavement. “I will!” 

Katya watches her ass in her jeans all the way to the door. She doesn’t look back and Katya feels a sinking dread that she’ll never see her again, there’s a light, misting rain blowing and she cranks on the windshield wipers, pulls out of the parking spot and rumbles off to the factory.

Katya would much rather do anything else than pump out cars in a factory all day. She’s damn good at it, she attaches hinges all day long, with a power drill, and when she gets home her hands are achy and her arms are vibrating from lifting and drilling, lifting and drilling. She gets fifteen for lunch and spends it in the employee cafeteria where Stalin stares down at her from a poorly-done, peeling painting on the baby-blue wall, the men she works with yelling so that it echoes in all of the metal tables and benches that are screwed into the floor. The other women sit with her but none of them speak, all of them want to take their time to rest before getting back to the monotony of building automobiles that none of them will be able to afford.

She used to bring books to work, but she doesn’t have the money anymore to buy new ones, her bookshelf at the apartment is half full of shitty propaganda novels and half stacked newspapers, faded cheap lettering and gathering dust. 

So she sits, twisting watery mashed potatoes around her fork, staring up at the wall, at the clock, at Josef’s piercing, vacant eyes all through her break. Sometimes her break lasts forever, fifteen minutes of choking blue and thick grease smell, but sometimes it flies by, and today is one of those blessed days.

She can’t stop thinking about Trixie. She doesn’t need her brain to do her job anymore, not even when she’s transferred for efficiency to another sector. She’s done everything thousands of times, so she can spend the entire day on her knees with the drill, imagining Trixie’s breasts in her hands and imagining how soft Trixie’s thighs must be. But also she can’t help but imagine Trixie pulling her tiny ponytail out, running her fingers through her short hair, washing it with soon-to-be rationed soap in Katya’s shower, sliding the grease and oil off of her limbs, massaging her hands, and then sitting out with her on the matching armchairs, or maybe on Katya’s lap in Katya’s chair, just breathing and skipping through the four TV channels.

When the bell rings for the end of shift, Katya is surprised by it. It’s gone by fast, and the concrete is cold under her knees. Her blue jumpsuit is sprayed with more gunk than usual, she’ll have to wash it at the laundromat tomorrow. It’s her worst nightmare, needing to drag her achy body across town, but she can hardly go another day with how filthy it is.

When she steps outside, the sun has set. In the summer it’s still out when she leaves, and it’s exhausting to be in the same walls for the whole day only to finally get to leave to dark nothing. She can barely drag herself to the car, can hardly turn the key. She smokes all the way home and it almost knocks her out at the wheel, her eyes are unfocusing by the time she pulls up to her building, climbs up the three flights to her hallway. The elevator’s been broken for five months and it’s never going to get fixed.

Sasha is already in her apartment when she opens the door. She has an extra key, and she’ll let herself in if Katya is late from work. 

“Long day?” She asks from the sink. She’s washing her hands and Katya’s jumper is on the floor again before she can respond. Sasha walks over to the chair as Katya is stretching up, pulling her thighs and arms up to the ceiling. She groans, sighs at the pull, lets her feet drop from her tippy-toes back to the ground, shakes her crampy fingers.

“The longest,” Katya’s forgotten about Trixie until the moment the phone rings, in the instant she’s about to make a beeline for the shower. Sasha reaches for it but Katya yells a “No!” and jumps to her chair, picks up the blue phone, grips it tight to her ear and glares at Sasha from where her hand is frozen next to the cord. 

“Hello?” Katya coughs a little. There’s a rustle on the other line.

“Hi.” It’s Trixie, Katya knows. She grins and Sasha squints at her, walks back to the sink slowly, dries her hands on the towel hanging on a nail on the wall next to it.

“Hey, pretty. How’s your day been?” Katya can feel her voice lowering and Sasha comes back curiously to sit next to her. Katya glares at her, waves at her to leave. She knows Sasha can hear Trixie if she sits this close. She takes out two cigarettes, passes one to sit between Katya’s fingers, lights them both quickly and leaves, just as Trixie is giggling into the phone.

“Bad, miserable actually. And you?” Katya laughs out smoke, curls her feet underneath her. She pulls the blanket from the arm and covers her bare legs with it, lets her eyes close. She misses her mouth with the cigarette and opens them again.

“The worst,” Katya sighs. Her shoulders ache but her fingers ache worse, so she props the phone between her shoulder and her ear, stretches her arms outwards. She makes a little grunt as she straightens against the chair, tries to let herself relax.

“What else is new, it never ends,” Sasha is bringing Katya a mug of vodka and water and Katya wrinkles her nose but takes it, chugs half. It’s hot down her throat and she welcomes it, swallowing slowly, letting it burn. “Where do you live?” Trixie’s asking, and Katya lets it all run down her throat before answering.

“In town, apartment. It’s not much. But. Maybe you’ll see it sometime soon, if you want,” Katya lets her voice drop further. She’s being ridiculous but she’s bored, and Trixie is gorgeous, and she probably looks lovely with a day’s work permeating off her, making her body loosen and ache. Katya would love to rub her down, would love to get her soaked and eat her right up, make her gasp with that raspy voice. She’s lost all her dignity right along with her energy, she’s fully prepared to ask Trixie over tonight before she realizes she doesn’t want Trixie on the train this late. Something tells Katya that if she asked, Trixie would come.

But Katya’s not going to ask just yet. And she likes that. Katya has a big map of the entire Union taped to the living room wall, it’s faded from the sun in a mark that matches the window, and the leaves are rustling and falling outside. Sasha is making sandwiches and Trixie is sighing over the line.

“I’d like that.” Trixie says. Katya lets the butt of her cigarette squish under her short, plain nails in the pale green ashtray. Sasha flips through the calendar hanging on the wall, reading Katya’s work schedule as she waits for the conversation to end.

“Well maybe I’ll pick you up from work tomorrow,” Katya smiles. Trixie giggles lowly, shifts the phone so it scratches in Katya’s ear. “We could go dancing,” Katya trails off, Sasha’s eyes on her again, widening this time. Katya’s not one to party, not anymore, but she has the next day off and she figures she could spend the night with Trixie, drinking and touching her all over, in the hot air of the only club in town. “You could stay over.”

Katya’s fingers tighten around the blanket as she waits for Trixie’s response. She can hear Trixie breathe in and out. The tree outside is rubbing against Katya’s dirty window and the floorboards are creaking under Sasha’s feet. 

“Okay,” Katya can hear her smile. “I rarely go dancing. Do you want my address?” 

Katya writes Trixie’s address down, and, sure enough, she’s living on a new private farm. Katya tries not to let her stomach burn in jealousy. Trixie likely doesn’t have any money, is probably just as poor, maybe poorer, than Katya, but the only thing Katya wants more than a break from factory work is a break from the government.

“You’ll be ready by 11?” Katya asks. Just saying the time out loud is exhausting, but if she turns in early tonight and takes the smallest power nap right after work she’ll be well rested to rub her body against Trixie’s until the wee hours of the morning. God, will she be ready.

“Sure thing,” Trixie is still smiling. Katya imagines she’s in bed, against the sheets, wearing pajamas, she imagines that she’s blushing and innocent and dreamy. Her voice is quieting and Katya wants to watch her eyes blink slower and slower until she falls into dreamland. “I’ll be all pretty for you.”

Katya’s heart skips a beat, her breath catches in her throat. And then she’s shaking it off, laughing close to the receiver so it sounds louder in Trixie’s ear. 

“Good,” Katya giggles. “I’ll look nice, too. I’ll wash my hair.”

Trixie laughs outright at that, shuffles around. Katya can’t control her grin, can’t stamp out the bubbles in her stomach. 

“See you then, pretty. I’ll be at yours at 11.” Katya whispers to her, a little. She can hear Trixie yawn. 

“Alright, see you,” Trixie hangs up, and Katya does too, sticks the phone back into the hard plastic contours with a loud noise. 

“Okay,” Sasha stalks over. Katya rolls her eyes.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says, turns the TV on. They’re watching the music video channel, it’s pretty fuzzy but Katya is content to let the audio blast her eardrums as Sasha stares at her patiently from the other armchair. Katya is drunk, drunker than she realized she was on the phone call, and she’s feeling airy, less heavy, she has a date with a beautiful woman and it’s tomorrow night, she’s going to fuck Trixie so good and Trixie might even come back for more, if Katya’s lucky. 

“You’ll have to tell me sometime,” Sasha grumbles. Katya isn’t too bothered. She’s content to sit, warm and half-naked, under her cozy blanket and listen to Alla until her ears bleed, with or without Sasha being nosy. “Katya.”

“God, what?” Katya is trying so hard not to smile. She can’t hex it, she needs to keep her mouth shut so that Trixie will touch her. And then last year’s Pesnya goda is being rerun and Katya is propping herself up on her feet on the chair, wrapping her blanket tight around her shoulders and cheering. Sasha laughs in delight and they take a minute to shit talk the hosts, Katya screeching at Sasha’s low grumbles. But she hasn’t gotten off the hook yet, and as the first performance starts up Sasha turns to her, puts a cool hand on her arm.

“Who was it?” She asks gently. Katya hates when she gets so genuine, Sasha can giggle for fifteen minutes straight at a story Katya waxes about a coworker, fall off her chair and cry tears of joy at the circumstances under which one could fuck up a car so royally. But she can also sit with her arms propped on her elbows on the armchair, hair pulled back with a brown plastic headband, and drop her voice almost to a whisper so that Katya can’t help but blurt out her entire life’s goals, all of her insecurities, all of her anxieties, just from how Sasha will lean in close and make her feel safe.

“I really don’t know her, okay. I met her on the side of the road this morning, gave her a ride to the store,” Katya watches the TV, where a cute brunette is hopping around the stage in a massive pink jacket, sparkles on her cheeks. The volume is still up pretty high, and Sasha pats her once on the arm before swinging her legs off the chair, walking to turn down the dial. “Don’t knock that!”

Katya’s positioned the antenna of the TV so that she can reach the excruciatingly faint signals from the channels they get in St. Petersburg. Tonight she’s lucky enough to have caught the music channel and she’s not going to let Sasha screw that up the ass.

“I won’t, I won’t,” Sasha mumbles as she gingerly winds the dial down. She puts it way too quiet for Katya’s tastes, quiet enough that she can give Katya a real good emotional thrashing. “Tell me about her.”

Sasha’s been Katya’s best friend for 23 years. She’s seen everything, seen Katya making her own dinners on school nights when her mother was trapped at the same factory Katya is working at now, seen Katya get burned by woman after woman, seen Katya’s mother cry and cry, over dramatic and callous because Katya had no choice but to die alone and she’s seen Katya sitting at her kitchen table, the tiny creaky one that used to sit in her mother’s bedroom in their tiny house outside the city, weeping over how badly she wants out.

She’s seen Katya flirt with women she cares about and women she wants to fuck, and she can tell the difference across worlds. Katya knows that she’s being even more transparent with Trixie than the others.

“I was driving,” Sasha nods encouragingly. It’s raining outside, tapping the window, and Katya looks over to the bottle of vodka on the table, but she doesn’t get up to refill her mug. “And she was trying to cross, and I’d never seen her before, not once, and you know I know every single pretty girl in this town.”

“Yeah,” Sasha prompts her to go on.

“So, so I stopped,” Sasha makes a little noise of discontent, she hates when Katya stops the entire street in the mornings so that women can cross in front of her car, hates it especially when the women know Katya from an encounter in a club bathroom or in Katya’s bedroom at 3am on a Tuesday, hates it when Katya embarrasses them. “So I stopped, yeah, and I signaled for her to cross. But she couldn’t through the other lane, and I just. I yelled for her to hop in, and she did! She just ran to my door and jumped in, all bouncy and blonde, yeah? Her name is Trixie and she’s young, and new, I guess.”

Sasha rolls her eyes. Katya blushes, she doesn’t know why she’s putting on a front for her when she can see right through her every time. Without fail, Sasha will always be there to laugh at Katya’s tomfoolery and ignorance.

“So you really like her,” Sasha’s voice is deep and soft. “A new blonde.” Katya nods, eyes back on the TV. If she turns and looks into Sasha’s eyes, she’s sure that she’ll be found out. Maybe her burning blush is hidden in the dim light of the lamp and the pitch black of the outside. She wants to turn the TV back up again, wants to laugh at the awful songs and get needlessly furious at all of the boring acoustic ones. “And you’re taking her dancing tomorrow night.”

“Yep.”

“Good.”

Katya’s head whips to the side. Sasha is smiling, the little smile that doesn’t show her big teeth. Katya doesn’t know why she’s so smug, doesn’t know why she’s being laughed at.

“You want more?” Sasha taps her mug with her nail. “I’m leaving soon, Shea is due back tomorrow morning and I want to be awake.” When Shea is living with Sasha Katya is secondhand. Which, for once, she doesn’t mind. At least for this one night with Trixie, she wants the apartment undisturbed. It’ll be nice, waking up with her, listening to her shower. The shower is hardly big enough for one but Katya can wrap her arms around her again once they’re both clean and wet, hair dripping on shoulders.

“No, I’m good, you can go,” Sasha kisses Katya on the cheek quick, yanks her purse up from where it’s sitting crumpled on the table, and calls a goodbye as she leaves to creep down the hall to her own apartment.

Katya turns the TV off soon after, drops her mug in the sink with a bang and brushes her teeth with heavy limbs. The light bulb over the mirror always buzzes, just quietly in her ears. She washes her face and stares for a few seconds, at her dark circles and wrinkles on her forehead, smiles at her reflection just to see what she’s like. 

She lies in her messy, unmade bed, half on top of the sheets. Her window is shut tight, so that the cold and the rain can’t creep in onto her legs, and she smokes a final cigarette in the pitch black, just a tiny line of light from between her curtains from the street light on the corner.

-

Katya is raring to go right after work. She punches out, whizzes home as fast as she can, allows her car to chug a little as she pushes it’s usual available spectrum of speed. She takes a thirty minute nap as she had planned the day before, showers and brushes through her hair, pulls half of it to the side with grease and lets the other half hang in front of her ear. She slides on some cheap brown lipstick, pinches her cheeks for a little blush, sprays on a tiny bit of cologne Shea had given her from her last trip to St. Petersburg. She zips up her only good jumpsuit, a brown one with symmetrical gray lines down the front, triangular, it’s warm enough that she doesn’t need a coat in the freezing early autumn.

She picks Trixie up from her farmhouse, barbed wire around her farmland, kisses her cheek when she sits on the seat next to her. Trixie smells like flowers, like the perfume Katya smelled faintly on her the morning before, and she rambles the whole way about her sheep. Katya lets her with a smirk, watches her hands gesture with the stories out of the corner of her eye.

Trixie pays for vodka shots and Katya stands next to her, leaning on the greasy bar, hair falling over one eye. It’s loud, louder than it used to be when Katya would go out to pick women up, there are more people here than she’s ever seen. She can barely focus on Trixie next to her, the stimulation from the lights and the pitch black, the blasting music and the overabundance of bodies on the dance floor and around the bar.

“I haven’t been here in years,” Katya yells into Trixie’s ear. Her hair is pulled up, off her neck, in a heavy bun at the back of her head. Katya wants to twist the tiny little curls falling out of it at her temples around her calloused fingers, touch Trixie’s forehead. She has tiny little gold hoops in her ears, a little eyeshadow smudged above her clumpy lashes. Her white blonde hair is reflecting the lights, she’s glowing.

“I haven’t been here period!” Trixie yells, knocks her first shot back quick, slamming the glass back on the bar. She winks at Katya, lets the other two slide down immediately after, the sleeves of her red button up twisted up to her elbows. Her fingernails are a little dirty, short with dust on the cuticles, and her shirt is tucked in her jeans, belt yanked tight around her waist. Her breasts are huge, Katya wants to suck on her nipples more than anything, but then she’s being pushed by a teen boy with a buzzcut, his cigarette almost running through her hair.

“Sorry, ladies!” He yells, pulling his girlfriend behind him, she’s too wasted to make a comment but she laughs and waves at them. Katya doesn’t care. Trixie steps forward, lips on Katya’s ear, pushes the three still-full shot glasses to her hand.

“You gonna take these so I can dance with you proper?” She says, and it slides down the back of Katya’s neck, down her spine. She nods and Trixie leans back, blinks at her. Green lights are over her face, flashing in the blackness. She’s backlit by blue, it matches her eyes. Katya knocks back all three shots in a row with her eyes never leaving Trixie’s, lets Trixie take her hand and pull her into the thick crowd.

It’s even louder in the middle of all of it. Trixie’s arms are around her neck before she can even get her bearings, and the alcohol is hitting her immediately or maybe it’s how much perfume Trixie is wearing, how her cheeks are a little damp with sweat. There are sweaty backs all over Katya, Trixie’s fingers are pulling on the short hair on the back of her neck, holding there, so that she’s strung up on the dull pain. Trixie’s earrings and eyes are shining in the darkness, she’s grinning across at Katya and then she’s grabbing Katya’s ass so that she yelps, Katya knows that she can’t hear her over the pounding music, the bass down under her feet and rattling her ribs and the rest of it making her inner ears ache. 

Trixie pulls her in by the hand on her ass, digs her fingers into the thick fabric of her jumpsuit. It’s the nicest thing Katya owns, and Trixie shrieked in delight at it when Katya jumped out of the driver’s seat to open the passenger door for her when she picked her up, but it’s too hot for the club, Katya knows she looks good with her cheap brown lipstick and her hair brushed and dried but it’s all going to melt away soon enough, along with her dignity beneath the heavy brown fabric.

But Trixie is pushing their breasts together, laughing against Katya’s mouth, the song is changing to something even louder and faster so that everyone is jumping around them. Katya feels like the club could explode, the teal brick walls could crumble with the tile flooring, both of their bodies crushed with the ceiling. She wouldn’t mind it, dying in this moment.

“Dance!” Trixie is screaming into her ear, bringing her hand from Katya’s ass to grip both of her upper arms, so tight it’s going to bruise in tiny fingerprints. Katya jumps with her, then, lets her lead and lets her pull her up and down, bump her lips against Katya’s ear and then grip her middle.

“You excited?” Katya says onto her neck. She’s twisted around her, arms and legs and nose, Katya is almost falling because she can’t keep her balance but she’s also swaying with Trixie, she can smell her hair over the stench of desperate teens that snuck in and lonely adults that have been here every night this week, the heady smell of weed and alcohol mixing thick in the smoke above their heads. 

“Yes!” Trixie screams, laughing up at the ceiling. Katya grips her shoulders, kisses her neck, Trixie’s chin comes down so quick that it knocks on Katya’s forehead painfully, Katya can hear her “Oops!” under her lips, gravely in her neck, she puts both hands on Katya’s cheeks to bring her up so she can kiss where she’s hit her. “Sorry!” 

And Trixie is dancing like everyone else, like she’s done this every night back home wherever she’s from, how ever many towns over. She’s laughing and closing her eyes only to open them wide to watch Katya fit into the contours of her body, touch her waist. Trixie can sing along to the songs playing, can scream them with the crowd, and Katya has never heard a single one but maybe she could convince Trixie to turn her radio to a different station so she could keep up with her.

Trixie digs around in her pocket, pulls out her pack of cigarettes and stuffs one in Katya’s mouth, one in her own, lights them both in a rare moment where she pauses her bouncing up and down. Trixie breathes in shallowly, exhales in Katya’s face, and Katya wants to kiss her warm, smokey lips with her own. But she wants to make sure, wants Trixie to kiss her first.

“Katya, it’s my song!” She’s yelling, right in Katya’s ear. Katya takes her cigarette in hand quickly so that Trixie’s baby hairs don’t light on fire, and Trixie holds the hand that’s holding it away from their bodies. It’s chaotic but Katya loves it, loves how Trixie is smoking right into her face still without a care in the world, laughing at her brightly. “I love this song, you know it?”

Katya laughs, shakes her head no and runs a finger over her eyebrow in the dark. Someone’s elbow is digging into her side but she can’t really feel or see anything but Trixie’s eyes and teeth. She lets her hands move slowly down Trixie’s shoulders to her breasts, so heavy and warm under her palms. Trixie pushes her chest up and Katya rubs across where her nipples are under her shirt and bra, cups her hands under them, digging fingers in. Trixie’s breath is increasing, making her chest move up and down with Katya’s sweaty hands. Trixie drops her cigarette and stamps it out quickly on the sticky floor. Katya follows suit as soon as she realizes that Trixie is about to touch her, too.

Katya slides one hand down from her breasts to cup her over her jeans. Trixie comes in closer, pushes down onto Katya’s hand so that her thumb digs in hard, and she can see Trixie gasp and clench her teeth in the dim light. Katya’s hands are shaking with the music, Trixie’s mouth is on hers, kissing her properly for the first time in the middle of the crowd. Katya moans into her lips, she can’t help it, she’s so wet already and her heavy jumpsuit is too constricting, she’s afraid for a moment that she’ll faint but then remembers to breathe through her nose.

Her breaths are hitching and her eyes are squeezed tight, she’s hardly drunk but Trixie’s body is putting in the work that three shots of vodka could never do, twisting Katya’s vision and making her arms buzz.

Trixie keeps kissing her, her tongue pressed against Katya’s. Trixie’s hands are on her chest, squeezing her breasts through her jumpsuit, her fingers kneading. Katya is still swaying with Trixie, she’s about to snap and spin out with how her feet stick to the floor, how her hand is still on Trixie’s hot pussy. She wonders for a moment if she could get away with undoing her belt right now, sliding her zipper down, but then Trixie is pulling back, her eyes glinting, taking Katya’s hand off her and holding it.

“I think we’ve seen enough!” She yells, and Katya laughs a big belly laugh, pulls her in to press a smacking kiss to her cheek. She can feel Trixie’s giggle echo through her chest with the beat.

“Let’s go,” Katya says, pulls her in the direction she knows the door is. Trixie is shrieking with laughter behind her, she’s wild and she wants Katya to take her home and fuck her right now, and Katya’s sweat is dripping down her face so fast she can’t keep up with it and how it’s falling into her eyes, but then she’s pushing through the door to the cold night, they can’t have been there for more than an hour but Katya’s sweat almost freezes the instant they’re out in the cool breeze. 

Trixie’s laugh minimizes when they’re outside, she’s too loud for the empty street and the muffled sounds from inside for a moment but she quiets, doesn’t stop. She has both hands on Katya’s waist from behind, slipping her fingers into her pockets, pulling out her car keys with a giggle. Katya grips her wrist and pulls them from her grip, brings her hand up to her mouth to kiss it, smudge her grainy lipstick over her knuckles. Trixie stops laughing, then, and when Katya looks up she’s blinking rapidly to try to regain the upper hand, but Katya doesn’t want to let her have it. She breathes up Trixie’s arm.

As she lets go Trixie backs up to turn to the passenger side, but Katya keeps her hand around her wrist and pushes her gently inside the car, to slide across the seat from the driver's side door. She drives home with Trixie’s fingers twisting her hair, watching her big ass as she leans over the seat again to drink more of Katya’s backseat vodka, as she lights a cigarette she finds in Katya’s glove box, smoking slowly out the window.

“You look beautiful,” Katya says quietly. It slips out of her, she can’t stop it, and Trixie whips her head around from the window to smile at her. It’s a big, genuine smile, and Katya cranks up the radio in the car to the current station, to the songs Trixie will know. She’s probably feeling sorry for herself listening to oldies all the time, anyways. Trixie laughs out into the night, her cigarette hanging between her fingers out the window. Katya lights one of her own even though they’re five minutes from her apartment.

“So do you,” Trixie looks back at Katya. Her skin is shiny with sweat, she’s rolled up her sleeves higher and her bun is deflating and falling a little. When she talks smoke spills from her sweet, soft lips, and her breasts jiggle with each bump in the road. She puts a hand over Katya’s on the steering wheel, taps her fingers a few times, then pulls it back to place it in her lap. One of her feet is on the dash, her pants tight around her stomach and her knee, bunching up where it’s bent.

Katya leads her up the stairs, and she can’t help but get a little hot at how Trixie whines at the elevator being out of service. She trails behind Katya a little, one finger in Katya’s pocket, pulling where she’s a few steps behind. 

“How much longer,” Trixie asks, whimpering a little. Katya slows, so that she’s on the same step as Trixie. She’s sweating down her forehead and Katya reaches to wipe it off. She puts out her cigarette on the railing, lets the butt sit where it is. 

“Not long, baby,” Katya mumbles, takes her hand in hers. “It’s not a mountain, and there’s a bed at the top. And a shower,” Trixie laughs, grips her hand to pull her back when she walks a little too fast.

Once they reach Katya’s front door she unlocks it with Trixie all pressed up against her back.

“Gonna fuck me good?” Trixie whispers hot into her ear. Katya’s eyes cross, she lets the door slam open, shuts it as quickly as she can as she watches Trixie walk through the apartment to her bedroom. “Come on!” 

Katya groans, pulls her shoes and socks off and pads to her, Trixie is unbuckling her belt and Katya lets her eyes follow her pretty hands, as she pulls the belt from the loops, lets it drop loudly to the floor. The streetlight out the window is casting a line, still, but this time it’s across Trixie’s body and Katya walks to her as she’s unbuttoning her jeans, unbuttons her shirt to pull it from her shoulders, unhooks her bra from her back. 

Trixie unzips her jumpsuit as she unhooks the white bra, as her breasts fall forward and Katya’s hands go right to them, they’re damp and her nipples are so hard that they give Katya shivers.

Trixie’s hands are pushing, pulling, trying to get her naked and Katya pulls back, lets go so that she can pull the jumpsuit down and off, taking Katya’s underwear with it. Trixie sighs and runs her fingers through Katya’s blonde curls, lets a stray finger dip into her wetness so that Katya grunts and thrusts down, but then she’s bringing both soft hands to Katya’s sweaty back to unhook her bra.

“You’re so strong,” Trixie whispers, their bare breasts are touching and Trixie’s are so big, her stomach so soft against Katya’s it’s driving her insane in the best way and she pulls Trixie back to the bed so she falls on top of her, the fabric of her pants rubbing against Katya’s thighs. “How’d you get so strong, fuck.”

Katya laughs into her mouth, shakes her head in amusement. Trixie’s hands are running over her arms and her stomach and squeezing her thighs as Katya pulls a knee up to wrap her calf around Trixie’s waist.

“Pants,” Katya says, and Trixie maneuvers out of her grip, pulls her pants and underwear down quick, leaves them on the floor in a pile. And she climbs over Katya, breasts almost knocking up against her face, her blonde curls falling from her bun. She kisses Katya’s collarbone, Katya grapples beneath her chin to pull her face up to kiss her mouth, she tastes like cigarettes and alcohol and skin.

Trixie hums into Katya’s mouth, pushes breaths out of her nose without rhythm, and grinds down so wet on Katya’s tan thigh. Katya pushes her against the pillows, pinching her nipples so she holds her breath and then gasps deep, kisses her at the end of her intake of air so that she’s cut off just a little bit. 

Trixie grips her hair so tightly when Katya kisses a trail down between her breasts, and she lets Katya stick her full, two fingers in her pussy and two in her ass, just resting so she has to bear down on them, bear down on Katya’s tongue against her clit. When she comes she whimpers, sobs just a little bit, Katya’s tongue cramps and she rests her cheek against Trixie’s thigh. And Trixie fingers her until she’s crying out on her teeth, hand gripping Trixie’s right breast and toes twitching on the sheets. 

Once Katya’s got her bearings, she sits up. Trixie’s fingers slide down her back, her nails just gently scratching as Katya pushes the window open. The air outside is freezing cold, and Katya rests her stomach across Trixie’s calves, smokes right out the window topless like she always does once she’s come and needs a cigarette, elbows out on the windowpane. Trixie’s hair is all over the pillow, her hair binder lost in the shuffle, her breasts shining with sweat and her stomach heaving with deep, tired breaths.

“So this is your place,” Trixie sighs. Katya smirks around the cigarette, turns to look her right in the eyes. Trixie is looking at her ass and she follows her voice up to her face. 

“Yep,” Katya says, and Trixie smiles. She turns, blinking slow, to stuff half her face into the pillow. Katya hadn’t thought to wash the pillowcases in her cursory sweep of the apartment earlier in the evening, but Trixie doesn’t seem to be shying away from whatever they might smell like.

By the time Katya’s finished the cigarette Trixie is asleep, and she shuts the window before it can get early-morning damp, curls herself up under the single sheet and around Trixie’s hot body, hands on her hips, nose in her hair. She smells like a night out, like sex, and Katya falls off the edge with her breathing softly in her ear. 

It’s autumn and the leaves are gathering on the sidewalks, whatever kids that have been had in the shaky political climate are jumping in them by the school and the cars are colder on the inside. Trixie’s little gold earrings glint in the dark, so do her teeth. She looks young in the morning light, the cool low clouds making her face round like the moon.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m saving up.” It’s easier to say it, somehow, when Trixie’s big eyes are locked with hers. Trixie is calm and lovely even in the gray ending day, cigarette hanging carelessly from her lips. Her blonde curls are falling over her bare breasts. She’s still holding Katya’s hand. “I’ve got a lot, I think.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi i'm back! after a little angst and a lot of screaming i've written this chapter. extra special thanks to UNHhhh and artificiallale for pulling me out of my writer's block and overdramatic overthinking on this chapter!!!!!!!! couldn't have done it without either of you. and then another big thanks to matilda_queen and the niche on tumblr for gassing me up about this fic whenever i whine about it like a big baby, i love you all and i hope you all, specifically, love this.
> 
> <3 hope you all like, come scream @katyastightass on tumblr <3

Trixie stays the morning, calls her mother from Katya’s blue phone to tell her she’s at a friend’s in town. Katya makes kasha with all the margarine she has left, she can see Trixie’s sweet tooth from across the bed, across her apartment, and Trixie eats her bowl at record speed, smirking at Katya across the table. Her ass is so round on the tiny wood chair, she watches Katya drool over her with knowing eyes.

“This is better than my Mama’s,” Trixie whispers, the chair squeaks as she moves up to her knees on it, kisses Katya’s nose with sticky lips. Katya pulls her chin down to kiss her, lips still a little swollen from a dirty makeout session on the bare mattress when they had woken up stuck together, the sheets crumpled on the floor. 

“That’s a lie,” Katya mumbles. Trixie lets her ass fall back onto her knees, the chair squeaks hard again and Katya flinches at the sound. Trixie’s eyebrows fly up. 

“Am I gonna break it?” She asks, and Katya laughs. 

“I just don’t want you to break your neck,” she says. Trixie giggles around her spoon, drops it with a clink in her bowl. Katya had finished moments ago and Trixie is standing in her underwear, tank top tight around her breasts. 

It’s hazy, the trees are whistling outside and the window is open a tiny crack so that the air is less stuffy with sex and sweat. Katya doesn’t work weekends, Trixie is being bad for skipping out on farm duties, and the trucks chug by so slow out on the street. 

Someone is always yelling out Katya’s window but today it’s all muffled, probably from the giant cloud that’s situated itself thick over the town, the cigarette smoke that’s wafting up from the sidewalk at the front of the building, making Katya’s fingers buzz. 

But she’s too lazy, too content to get up. Trixie is hanging out the window now, breasts squished between her arms in her flimsy top, waving down to people on the street. Trixie has a screeching laugh and Katya wants to get up, stalk over to where her ass is sticking out with her body bent and grip her around her middle, settle her on her lap on an armchair. 

She doesn’t, she lets Trixie giggle down at stray dogs and kids playing hooky, seven year old boys chain smoking hidden behind brown bushes in the lot. 

Then she’s extricating herself from the window, turning to Katya with her breasts bouncing so wonderfully. 

“Did you waste all your margarine on me?” She’s grinning, walking slowly to the radio, turning it on and somehow getting it to switch stations to her favorite with just a single swipe. Katya doesn’t know if she’s real. 

“Waste? Hardly.” Trixie laughs and wiggles her sloping hips and waist to the slow synth that’s already playing at ten in the morning. “I don’t mind sharing.”

Trixie crooks a finger in her direction to beckon her over, wiggling her perfect pale eyebrows with her lips turning upwards even more. 

“We hardly got to dance last night,” she says as Katya pushes herself up from her seat with two hands on the table. She takes Trixie’s hand from where it’s still held out, lets her pull her in tight against her, up against her big breasts in the soft shirt and her warm thighs against Katya’s cold ones. Katya laughs a little against her lips. 

Trixie braces her small hands on Katya’s hips, spreads her fingers farther down to where her ass curves outward a little. She kisses Katya so slowly that Katya’s fingers fall limply from where they’re resting on Trixie’s shoulders to her ass, where she can set them and squeeze, so that her hips shift and rub against Katya’s in their underwear. 

Trixie pulls back and starts to sway languidly even though the song is fast, smiling and twirling Katya around the living room, bare feet on the hardwood floor. Her hair is falling over Katya’s hands, so she twirls the gentle curls with her fingertips and tugs on them a little. 

Trixie is singing very quietly along with the music, it’s too low for her range but she whispers it deep in her throat, and she lets herself wrap closer around Katya right by the cold air that’s now winding faster through the window. 

“Let me get a cigarette, princess.” 

Trixie giggles, pulls back so that Katya can walk to the table and light one in her mouth. When she returns from stuffing the match in the ashtray Trixie is right up close in front of her, hips knocking together. She pokes Katya’s sucked-in cheek, her eyes are bright blue and her lips pink. She’s a Russian dream girl, perfectly flushed and curvy, curls falling down her back and tucked behind her tiny ears. 

“So, what do you do on your days off?” Trixie is leaving her hips, turning to twirl again in the middle of the floor, arms spread out giddily. Katya laughs through smoke at her, leans back to prop her ass against the table and watch. 

“Nothing much,” Trixie lets herself fall dizzily on an armchair. There’s a pretty curl falling in front of her eyes. 

“Can I stay here?” She grins with all her teeth, Katya nods without even thinking about it. Trixie pulls her legs up under her, wraps a blanket that was carelessly draped over the back of the chair around her body. “What channels do you get? I bet you’ve fixed it so you get the good stuff, ‘cause you’re all smart,” Katya barks a laugh at the statement, starts fiddling with the TV to try to get the music channel. 

It’s too foggy to reach the antenna’s signal all the way to St. Petersburg, and Katya settles on a channel with silly propaganda cartoons that make her gulp some days, make her laugh on others. 

But today she laughs at the Soviets and the Americans with Trixie, she lets Trixie laugh dangerously, deliriously at the foreboding Soviet soldiers and the big, caricatured weapons. Trixie squeals at the big-breasted Russian women that pop up to kiss their husbands good luck, winks at Katya as the smoke from their cigarettes flows above the lamp, circling Trixie’s curls.

“That’s me, and you’re my handsome soldier husband,” Trixie says around her cigarette. Her fingers curl around the paper delicately and Katya’s stomach swings upwards at her words. She holds in her groan and turns to face Trixie where she’s smirking so that smoke falls from her pink lips. She winks at Katya and ashes her cigarette with her dainty thumb.

“With those tits, you’re damn right,” Katya huffs. Trixie hums and shifts her legs beneath her. “Hardly as pretty as you, though.”

Katya’s blush rushes to her face via her neck, but Trixie is grinning over at her and twirling a curl around her fingers, twisting it around her wrist. Katya smiles back and they both stare for a seeping minute before turning back to the screen that keeps cutting out every couple of minutes.

At some point in the early afternoon Trixie staggers with half-asleep feet to the kitchen to fetch a brand new bottle of vodka from Katya’s cupboard, where she has at least three full bottles left. She’ll need to stock up, but for now she lets Trixie crack the seal, take the first heavy swig. 

Katya gets properly drunk, drunk enough that she’s kneeling on the floor in front of Trixie, between her soft thighs. Trixie’s hands slide through her hair, her thumbs dig below her cheekbones. She’s smiling slowly down at Katya and she kisses her forehead, making her sigh out her nose. Trixie smells like Katya’s plain hand soap, like Katya’s sweat, and she tries to pull Trixie up from where she’s sitting to bring her to the bed.

“Baby, baby,” Katya grumbles as Trixie won’t stand, she’s giggling into her elbow against the soft blue chair. “Come on, let me fuck you.” Trixie screams a laugh, mingling with the tinny synth and the wind and the leaves. There are yellow leaves gathering a little bit on the floor under the window, Katya can feel a tugging urge that she only gets while drunk to sweep them up. But then Trixie is standing, kissing her hot on the chin, twisting arms around her waist.

“You’re still so strong,” she slurs against Katya’s lips. Katya giggles, smiles too big to be kissing. “You have abs!” 

Katya is laughing properly now, bending forward so her nose touches Trixie’s. She’s breathing her vodka breath all over her face. Her hair is stringy in Trixie’s eyes and she pushes it back from Katya’s forehead, kisses her smacking on the mouth.

Trixie is only in her flimsy top and underwear, her bra is somewhere on the floor of Katya’s bedroom and she’d been cuddled up in a blanket on the chair. But now Katya’s fingers across her arms are blooming goosebumps, making her laugh delightedly and shiver in Katya’s grasp.

“Can I get you naked?” Katya asks. Trixie kisses her again, tongue reaching out to hit her lips before her lips do, licking along Katya’s. Katya sways as her eyes close, she’s too drunk to stay standing in one spot and leaning on Trixie makes them both fall a little so Trixie is on her lap in the chair.

The seat is still warm where Trixie’s ass has been all day and Trixie is hot skin above her. She coils up in Katya’s lap, still kissing her, and Katya’s arousal blooms further down her legs and to her fingertips. Trixie is breathing loudly and her breasts are squished against Katya’s. Her nipples are so hard, delicate skin scraping against both of their shirts. It’s making her insane, all of the feelings at once and nonstop, and then Trixie is up and off of her, pulling down her underwear and leaving her shirt on, turning to stumble to the bedroom.

Katya sits in the chair for long enough to watch her huge ass bounce on the way there, she doesn’t look back but she flips her hair so that all of it is falling down her back in white curls. Katya’s tangled them herself, pulled on them last night and slept on them carelessly, she knows that they’re warm and silky and wonderful. They fall almost to the curve of Trixie’s ass, Trixie’s thighs jiggle too, as she walks, and Katya’s stomach is so heavy with the sight that she can only stand to push herself up from the chair as slowly as her drunk hands will allow.

The radio is still on, and Katya takes it with even drunker fingers into the bedroom. Her window is shut and she shuts the door behind them, too, closes the room off to the living room and the propped window. Katya’s squatting before Trixie can get on her knees, nudging her legs open and pushing her against the wall, licking up her once, twice, nestling her nose into her and humming.

Trixie is soaking wet, she’s starting to drip down her thighs and Katys brings curious fingers up to spread her wetness around, she can feel Trixie’s knees buckling against her bent elbows. Trixie is making tiny whimpering noises and grinding against Katya’s face, and Katya wonders if the second her tongue is back on her she’ll be falling on top of Katya’s bent knees with her unsteady legs.

“You smell so good,” Katya mumbles. Trixie laughs breathlessly, pulls on Katya’s greasy hair a little bit so that her face is pressed flat against her wetness. Katya smiles and Trixie bears down or maybe falls a little bit farther onto her, and Katya whimpers as she puts more of her body weight down on Katya’s face.

Katya grips her thighs tightly, digs fingers into the achingly soft flesh. Trixie laughs, cut off with a gasp as Katya pushes a finger inside her. Katya can’t discern if it’s too fast or too slow, Trixie is whining so prettily and she reaches a hand down to slide it through Katya’s greasy hair. 

They still haven’t showered despite Katya’s late-night, almost-sober promises. Later they’ll shower and Katya will get to run her soapy hands all over Trixie’s body, but now she focuses on smelling Trixie’s skin, the remnants of her sweat from the club hidden somewhere in her pores. Trixie’s head falls back against the wall that’s between Katya’s bedroom and Sasha and Shea’s, and Katya doesn’t feel one bit guilty about the noise. They’re probably cuddled on the couch, watching TV and drinking tea innocently, anyway.

Trixie is rubbing her scalp, and it’s going right to Katya’s stomach. She’s so wet that she’s afraid she’ll drip onto the floor, she lets her knees fall to the ground with a thump that’s sure to anger her downstairs neighbors. They’re an ancient couple, much less forgiving and much more straight than Katya’s best friends.

“Katya, Katya,” Trixie breathes. Katya pulls back and Trixie whimpers, pulls her forward again so Katya kisses her on her curly blonde pubes, digs her nose and tongue into her skin. Trixie does smell good, taste good, she’s so beautiful and Katya’s hand that isn’t rubbing slowly against her wetness, thrusting a finger inside her is gripping her hip.

Katya is eating her out so sloppily, she can’t get her tongue to do much but run across her clumsily and repeatedly but Trixie is grinding forward against her face. Katya lets her, slides another finger inside her without resistance. She’s so wet, Katya keeps swallowing her down and curling her fingers into her as she drips down them, down her chin.

Katya’s never fucked a woman that’s gotten this wet. She’s fucked women that wanted to be tied down, women that wanted her to spank them and pinch their nipples until they cry. She’s fucked women that squirted across her breasts, but she’s never fucked a woman that was soaked and sticky like Trixie is, or whined like Trixie is whining. 

Katya’s drunk, but Trixie is beautiful. And when Katya pushes a third finger inside her she gasps for so long that it makes her cough a little, giggle at the end of it.

“Katya, bed,” Trixie slurs. Katya is standing the second she says it, her knees smarting from being pressed into the floor and her head spinning from the sudden change in altitude. She leans against the wall and pulls Trixie against her, and Trixie laughs as Katya kisses her with her sticky lips. Trixie can taste herself and Katya fucks her mouth with her tongue so she swallows a muffled moan. 

Katya still has three fingers inside her. She’s sure that they’re pruning up but Trixie is grinding against the heel of her palm, bouncing a little on her fingers.

“Touch me,” Katya says through her teeth. Trixie gives a little “Oh!” and slides a hand down to rub her, and the initial pressure is too much, making Katya recoil back against the wall. Trixie softens it, and rubs in slow, slow circles with no discernable rhythm or reasoning with where she’s putting her fingers, and Katya thrusts to get them to slide over her clit once.

“Katya,” Trixie says. Katya’s eyes are squeezed shut but she opens them to Trixie’s big blue ones, her lashes are blocking them from view a little with how they’re hooded but her pupils are blown wide and desperate. “Bed.”

Katya pulls her from the wall and guides her to the bed, tripping over her feet and rubbing their thighs together. Her fingers fall out of Trixie and Trixie whimpers with the loss as they fall together on Katya’s wire-frame bed, the mattress squeaking underneath them. 

“Let me touch you,” Trixie says. Katya scoots up the bed and props herself against the wire headboard and the wall behind with the pillows, and Trixie’s hands are on her stomach the instant she settles. She runs them up to her breasts, squeezes them so Katya grunts. Trixie is so pretty straddling her, how her shoulders slope and allow her hair to rest on them and how flushed she is, how she’s getting Katya’s stomach wet. 

Katya is a bit more sober and a lot more sweaty, but she’s still drunk and she knows that she won’t be completely sober until the morning. Trixie leans in too fast, falls a little and grips her breasts tighter as she careens to Katya’s lips for a slow kiss. Katya imagines that she can taste her margarine on Trixie’s tongue, lets her insides ache with how she’s fed Trixie and fucked her, how she wants to fuck her again and again and eat her out until she’s full.

When Trixie’s done kissing her, Katya grips her around the waist and lifts her off of her stomach with a grunt, takes her thigh in hand and pulls it off of her stomach, kneels next to where she’s placed Trixie lying against the other pillow, shoulder against the wall.

“Be good,” she whispers, and then she puts her mouth back on her right as she pulls Trixie’s pretty thighs apart.

This time she focuses, she knows that Trixie can’t be far from release due to her high whines that are drumming inside Katya’s skull. And then Trixie’s thighs are tightening around Katya’s head, squeezing her tightly as she comes, and Katya realizes that she’s coming, too, with her own fingers against her wetness, twitching as Trixie’s sweaty skin stops her breaths.

-

Trixie is spread gently over her, hand on her arm, head on her stomach. It’s the late afternoon, now, and Katya’s thoughtlessly turned the radio back to the oldies station. The sky looks empty out the window, she can’t discern the clouds from more clouds, can’t see them moving past. It’s just gray, gray, gray, but Trixie’s skin is beautiful cream, real butter, pretty brown nipples and long fingers on Katya’s skin.

Katya has the vodka in hand, she’s swigging and passing to Trixie, and Trixie’s throat is flexing with her swallow as she’s propped up on her elbow, now. 

Katya is so drunk, and Trixie keeps looking into her eyes and moving closer and pulling back, again and again, the crackle of the radio in the shadowy room echoing off of her chest. 

“Katya,” Trixie says half into her side, lips barely ghosting against her skin. Katya’s dizzy.

“Yeah,” she mumbles back. A truck heaves by, clanking the walls of the building with it’s heavy factory load. Katya can feel the tight ache in her chest that comes with work-related panic. Trixie slides a hand up her arm to hold her face. 

“I’m drunk.” Katya laughs, Trixie’s eyes are squeezed shut with her own laughter. Her hair is tickling Katya’s stomach, her breasts, and her laughs are reverberating through Katya’s entire body. 

“Me too, baby.” Katya can feel her words slurring, the pillow is up against her ears but she can hear Trixie’s fingers rustling in her hair, on her temple, on her cheek. The ceiling is swirling a little, skipping wide film stills.

“Katya?” Katya brings a hand up to put it over the hand Trixie still has resting on her face. 

“Yes,” Katya squeezes her fingers.

“You look sad,” Trixie shifts, sits up and places the bottle overly carefully on the floor next to the bed. Katya tries to slot away a reminder to not knock it over when they get up, once they inevitably wake up in the middle of the night hungry. And then Trixie’s words register.

“Huh?” Trixie puts her nose in Katya’s neck, brings slow hands to her ears to slide the strands behind them, get them out of Katya’s face. She’s slow and soft, Katya can feel her all over. She wants to reach for her cigarettes but they’re on the side table and she can’t pull her tendons that far.

“I don’t know,” Trixie mumbles, kisses Katya’s cheek. Katya turns her head so her lips drag along her skin, meet her lips softly. Katya’s gums are numb, but she kisses Trixie slowly and listens to her little breaths, feels them against the skin of her face. Trixie pulls back, puts her hand right over Katya’s armpit, digging fingers into the soft skin there right above her breast. “You just look sad. You dream a lot?”

Trixie is talking into Katya’s chest now, her lips are so wonderfully soft. She makes Katya want to get her in a long red dress, twirl her around in a ballroom, then pull her back in a tapestry-covered back hall and lift the dress up, kiss her stomach and kneel between her thighs.

“I dream a lot, sure,” Katya says out of the corner of her mouth. Sasha gets annoyed with her talking halfway, but sometimes Katya can’t spare the energy to speak with her entire mouth open.

“What do you dream about, then?” Katya puts both her hands flat on Trixie’s soft, pale back. She breathes deep, her eyes skip to the door and then the radio, she’s had it since she was young enough to sneak into the club and old enough to want to sneak girls in through the creaky back door while her mother slept drunk.

“I’m leaving.” 

Trixie’s head slowly rises from Katya’s skin, her eyes are wide, her mouth open a little bit. Katya can feel her heart clenching, with fear of Trixie telling, with the heavy feeling of how Trixie’s eyes are closing off, a little bit. 

“Where are you going? You don’t like me?” Trixie’s eyes are maybe welling up a little bit, and then it clicks and Katya is laughing the way she only can when she’s drunk, sloppy and tight in her stomach, happiness sliding down her spine. Trixie’s eyebrows are low over her blue eyes, she’s climbing off of Katya’s chest but Katya shakes her head, tries to calm down, pulls Trixie back on her. 

“I like you a lot, it’s stupid. I mean, I’m stupid. For you.” Katya takes a shaky breath. “No. I mean leaving here.” 

She can feel the energy of the room shift. She wishes that she was a little less drunk, wishes that she could properly articulate what she means to Trixie without having to actually say the words. She can’t speak without slurring her words, either, and she hopes that Trixie isn’t more sober and judging her, but she can feel Trixie’s eyes on her. She’s shifted to lying next to Katya, her head on the pillow too, hair pooling by Katya’s ear.

“Where are you going,” Trixie whispers. It’s almost just a breath, impossibly soft. She’s scared, Katya can taste it, and it tastes sour and bitter and lonely.

“I think that you know,” Katya whispers back. She can’t look at her, and she pulls away to get a cigarette. The sun is setting as much as it ever does out the window, behind layers and layers of clouds. When Katya learned that clouds were made of tiny drops of water in primary school, she didn’t believe it. She still doesn’t, clouds are made of cigarette smoke, of gas and steam.

“How?” Katya tries to light the match but her fingers are shaking too much, then the bed is shifting and Trixie’s legs are wrapping around her from behind, she’s putting her hands over Katya’s and lighting the match for her with steady fingers. She lights the cigarette, grapples with the pack to light her own and takes Katya’s hand to pull her back around.

“I’m saving up.” It’s easier to say it, somehow, when Trixie’s big eyes are locked with hers. Trixie is calm and lovely even in the gray ending day, cigarette hanging carelessly from her lips. Her blonde curls are falling over her bare breasts. She’s still holding Katya’s hand. “I’ve got a lot, I think.”

“You think?” Trixie scrunches up her nose. It’s the end of shift and the cars are starting to drive by. They’re so loud right out the window, and Katya can feel them rumbling on the dirty street in her lower stomach. They’re both breathing out smoke and it’s mixing in the air, coming from inside both of their mouths and lungs.

“I haven’t counted it.” Katya takes a long drag, watches Trixie’s face twist in confusion. “I’m going to soon, I. I just haven’t yet.”

“Why?” Trixie asks. Katya turns, stamps out the cigarette in the ashtray and takes Trixie back down to lie on top of her, she’s too dizzy to stay sitting upright. She likes the weight of Trixie over her, how she puts her hands on Katya’s body. She reaches across Katya to put her own cigarette out, exhales from between her teeth over Katya’s breasts.

Katya never answers and Trixie falls asleep minutes later. Katya lies awake for maybe an hour more, reaches to turn off the radio so that she’s lying in silence. It’s pitch black when she drifts off, like she needs it to be, and she’s drunk enough for a perfectly dreamless sleep.

-

She doesn’t wake Trixie in the morning. She takes one look at her with her mouth hanging open against the pillow and knows she couldn’t bear it, not when she’s likely hungover and grumpy. Katya wants to leave her to rest for ever and ever, so that she sleeps through whatever is going on in Moscow.

She showers (without Trixie), brushes through her hair (a little), and stuffs herself full of bread (all she has left to eat) before yanking the door shut behind her dressed in a less-dirty jumpsuit. She gets the car to start after a few good turns of the sticky ignition, and chugs to the factory at a slower pace than usual.

It’s quiet in the car, she doesn’t feel like rolling the windows down to smoke or yell, and she can feel the dim sun through the clouds above her. When she comes back in the darkness she knows that Trixie will be gone, but maybe she’ll call her when she’s done with all of her hard farm work that makes her ass so fat with climbing ladders or walking with the cows or whatever one does when you have more freedom in the ways you make your living.

Katya floats through her workday again, she hardly jumps at the shift bells anymore but today she does, she’s unfocused on her surroundings. It feels like everyone is moving in slow motion, too, her closest friend Alexei at her station is sniffling like he’s come down with something so Katya steers clear of him, even from talking to him at more length than simply asking to share equipment. Catching a cold is hardly productive when days off are agonizingly hard to come by. 

Katya bruises her fingers on a hinge halfway through her shift, and in the brief flash of pain she remembers Trixie’s lips, in a fleeting moment of softness wants them kissing her where her skin is twisted and red. She eats more bread for lunch and vows to stop at the store on her way home, throw whatever she can in a bag and be done with it. Maybe if Trixie comes over she’ll bring more food she’s snuck from the farm, Katya is certain that she’s one of the farm girls that drinks the milk straight from the cow’s udders, sour on her tongue. 

But Katya doesn’t have any way of knowing if Trixie will ever come back.

Trixie is better than Katya. It’s the truth, pure as the crystal glass of an unopened bottle of vodka, pure as the water of the showers in Katya’s old country house where her mother wasted away. Trixie is young, with prospects and beauty and dreams less lofty than running away, she’s smart with the knowledge of how to run a farm and how to work with the government and how to speak to others. 

Trixie’s body is unreal, her breasts and ass are massive and pale and beautiful, her hair is big and soft and wavy, and she wears tiny gold accessories like any good Russian girl would, pinches her cheeks for blush and bites her bottom lip when she’s thinking. She wears lots of red, she looks like a woman, and she has the money and resources to have fat on her bones, to have a soft waist that her belt cuts into.

She’s too good for Katya.

She knows that Trixie is wild but that she has her own things to cry about, but in Katya’s heart of hearts she wants to project the image of a careless girl right onto Trixie’s smooth freckled cheeks, wants to protect her and fuck her good and sequester her away for a little bit in her apartment. Katya wants to smoke with her and eat her ass and drink, drink, drink with her, until Katya forgets the box under the bed and starts thinking about how her and Trixie are going to move to St. Petersburg and get secretary jobs.

Katya clocks out of her shift and starts the drive home. Her calves are aching, she’s probably been kneeling on them weird for her entire shift. She escapes the line that’s full of other late-night factory workers greasy under fluorescents with a bag full of margarine, sausages, potatoes, and whatever else she can scavenge for cheap, plus some ice cream for Trixie in case she ever comes back.

Katya feels domestic purchasing things she herself would never bother to eat for Trixie, she shoves them in her freezer alongside some old meat she’s never going to muster up the energy to throw out with some kind of warm feeling curling in her belly, embarrassed but also somehow more grown-up, more purposeful and prepared. 

And then her phone is ringing so loudly she jumps, drops the bag of bread right on her bare feet. She takes a second to pick it back up, toss it to the counter, and then she’s curling up in her chair and answering.

“Hello?” She curses how soft her voice is. But she also doesn’t really care, when she thinks about it in the flash of silence afterwards, she doesn’t mind that she’s softened for Trixie, and that’s what makes her gut harden in the most disgusting way.

“Hi,” Trixie says. Katya tenses when she realizes that it could have been anyone else, and she still would have answered the phone the way she did in case it was Trixie. She doesn’t regret it. “I missed you when I woke up.”

Katya swallows. She’d left Trixie a note, a fast-written, careless description of where she’d run off to, had set it on the bedside table underneath the ashtray, hoping Trixie’s eyes would find it when she woke. 

“Did you get my note?” She mumbles, and Trixie laughs a little, snorts. 

“Yeah, thanks, I did. I still missed you, though,” she says. Katya smiles with her words, she’s a little out of breath.

“You been working?” Katya asks. The phone shuffles a little bit and Trixie giggles breathily at the question.

“Yeah, just got back. We had to tie up the fence again,” she says. Katya knows that she has the attic room, that she’s floors away from her three brothers and parents. She can imagine Trixie taking off her little gold necklace and earrings, untying her hair from the brown ribbon she puts it up in so that it falls down over her shoulders in waves with one big bent part from where it’s been up all day. “I showered at yours, hope you don’t mind.”

Trixie sounds like she knows Katya doesn’t, and it makes Katya laugh out loud. Trixie joins her and they slowly let the laughter die into warm silence. Katya’s heart is beating faster than she wants it to be.

“Of course I don’t mind, come shower here whenever,” Katya is still grinning. Trixie giggles a little.

“Okay, let me put the phone down and put on my pajamas,” Trixie says and her words muffle halfway through so Katya knows that she’s already setting the phone down. Katya’s blushing even though Trixie is all the way across town, but Katya remembers vividly how her breasts look bare and the soft flesh at her sides, around her curved waist. 

“I’m back,” Trixie sounds closer again and Katya smiles.

“Welcome back,” she whispers. She doesn’t need to.

“I want to fuck you again,” Trixie says, and Katya’s heart skips. Her eyes widen and she mouths a curse to herself before breathing in to reply.

“You can do that.” Trixie laughs again. She thinks everything Katya says is funny and interesting, she watched her with such serious eyes in bed the night before. It’s going to kill Katya, slowly and quietly.

“I want to fuck you, and then I want to redecorate your place,” Trixie says. Katya can hear her shifting, shuffling around. “It’s so sad in there.”

Katya laughs deep down in her stomach, stifles herself when she looks around herself to remember it’s midnight, that everyone around her separated by flimsy walls are fast asleep, dreaming of work tomorrow and work the next day. 

Trixie is laughing too, and she trails off as Katya stops.

“It’s not sad, just… just a little dingy,” Katya says, smirking. 

“You shut your mouth, it’s sad,” Trixie is smiling and Katya can hear it. “It’s so fucking sad, how can you stand it? You should buy a rug.”

Katya laughs again, fills a cup with water and drinks it as Trixie whines on and on about how she thinks a persian rug would look wonderful in the space, how she likes the map across from the window but thinks that the walls could be painted a light green. Katya’s eyes slide shut at some point and she lets her tense body release with how Trixie’s words roll along with the crackle of the phone.

At some point Trixie realizes that Katya isn’t responding anymore and she whispers something about bedtime. Katya’s eyes open and her brain comes back after the endless, one-sided conversation about interior design. 

“So you want to come over Saturday?” Katya asks. She isn’t overthinking it, for once, she isn’t playing cool for the purpose of getting a girly, bouncy woman to want her, she wants Trixie over and maybe she wants Trixie to convince her to spread paint all across the walls, drip it down her arms and forehead.

“Yeah,” Trixie says, yawns for a good three seconds before saying goodbye, hanging up with a click.

-

Katya floats through the work week much like she did on Monday, her mind running past how the machines work and off into the realm of Trixie’s lips or how much Katya would like to wash her hair. And when Saturday morning comes and Katya is barely out of bed, in just a dirty t-shirt and holey socks, Trixie knocks on her door.

She’s flushed from the cold, the natural blush on her cheeks spreads out into her hairline with her freckles. She has her hair in two thick braids that she’s pinned up so that they hang in heavy circles around her ears, and she’s wearing the little gold hoops again. She’s tied a shawl around her head, and the floral-print wool meets her skin and makes it look even paler, even more creamy and soft. She smiles mischievously when Katya opens the door half-naked, looks her up and down and lingers on her thighs a little bit before leaning forward to kiss her on the cheek, push her way inside.

Katya stands dumbly in front of the door once she’s shut it, watches Trixie untie her shawl and hang it on the metal coat rack with her big brown jacket. She’s wearing the jeans again, the ones that must be a couple sizes too small for how tight they are around her thighs and how they slope close against her ass, dig into her waist. Her thick gray sweater has long pieces of blonde hair on it that she pulls off with her nose scrunched up, and then Katya spots how she’s carried two huge bags into the apartment, set them down on the floor next to where she’s untying her brown boots.

They’re matching in their ripped socks, and Trixie comes up to Katya again to kiss her quickly on the lips. 

“I brought some stuff, come look,” Trixie pulls her by the hand to the bags. “In this one I brought some food, just stuff we aren’t going to eat that I’m supposed to give to family friends,” she winks at Katya and her eyes scrunch up in little wrinkles with her smile. Katya supposes that she’s noticed them before but certainly not this close and not this sober. She hasn’t even had a single cup of coffee this morning. Trixie is only twenty-three, and she has little wrinkles from the wind.

“Thank you,” Katya says, as Trixie pulls cabbage and fresh potatoes out of the bag, a bottle of fresh cow’s milk that Katya will have to suffer through. She takes the food and puts it away, puts on a pot of coffee and takes out two red mugs that she hopes are the least dusty of all of them. Trixie is still at the armchair, digging around in the other bag and humming the melody of one of her synth songs. Katya can’t help but smirk at her ass where she’s bent over, reach across the counter to flip the radio on to Trixie’s station, which she’s marked with a tiny piece of tape.

“Do you have a scissors?” Trixie asks. Katya digs them out of the junk drawer, crosses over to Trixie. She grips her ass cheekily so that she yelps, jumps up, and Katya can see into the second bag. It’s full of fabrics and mystery items wrapped in newspaper, and Katya rolls her eyes.

“You don’t think you’re decorating my apartment?” Katya asks. Trixie squints back at her, takes the scissors. Katya’s hand is still on her ass.

“Sure I do,” Trixie smirks. Katya rolls her eyes, goes back to the kitchen counter to pour coffee for both of them. She knows that she can’t stop Trixie from doing anything to her apartment, but she _also_ knows that she can take anything down that she doesn’t want immediately after Trixie leaves Sunday night, or, if she’s lucky, Monday morning.

“Do what you need to do, then,” Katya sighs, sets Trixie’s coffee on the table and leaves to change into jeans and a sweater for the day. She runs her fingers over her eyes to dig the sleep out of them, splashes water on her face and brushes her teeth while Trixie bangs around outside the door. Once Katya is finished with her hair slicked back a little out of her eyes with water, she takes a second to brace herself for whatever she might find in the room.

Trixie is hanging up new floral curtains that drop to the floor on the windows. They’re red and they change the light from the sun as they flap in the wind. Trixie’s opened the windows in the living room and the window in the kitchen wide and she’s pulled her shawl around her shoulders, wrapped it around her neck so that she’s warm despite the cold wind.

“I’m airing this place out, here,” Trixie leaves the second curtain still half hanging down the side of the window and walks to the bag, passes Katya a duster from the depths of it. “Dust.”

Katya takes it from her silently, she’s broken out in a little bit of a sweat and her soft baby hairs are sticking to her temples with it. Katya lifts a finger and swipes across her forehead once to sweep up the tiny droplets, wipes it off on her sweater as Trixie’s lips pull into a smile.

“Okay,” Katya starts with the cupboards, goes through the entire apartment as methodically as possible without missing any spots that Trixie could scold her about. The entire time that Katya dusts Trixie spends hanging the rest of the curtains (they don’t match each other, the ones she’s put in the living room and the kitchen and Katya’s bedroom, and Katya is reluctant to admit even in her own head that she likes it) and propping little trinkets up along her cupboards, putting a tiny little embroidered pillow on the armchair Katya usually uses. 

“Katya!” Trixie calls her in from the living room. “I want to dust under here.” She’s on her knees and peering under the half-size bookshelf. “I can’t lift it.”

Katya pads over, lifts from the top of the shelf carefully, bracing it so that none of the books or records on top fall off. Trixie dusts under quickly and Katya sets it back down slowly once she’s finished and Katya is sure that her pretty hands are out of the way.

Katya is about to turn to the bedroom when Trixie’s hand on her arm stops her. She squeezes, and Katya turns to face her. Her pupils are blown out, she’s straightened to her usual height so she’s looking down at Katya but her breasts are heaving as she borderline pants in Katya’s face.

“Fuck,” she whispers, rests a hand on the back of Katya’s neck and pulls her in, kisses her with just a slow press of soft lips. It lasts forever, and at one point Katya drops the duster and lightly taps the sides of Trixie’s face with her fingers, lets the sides of her palms sit on her neck. 

Trixie kisses just as slowly and softly as Katya first imagined she would. It matches her, her innocent farm girl looks and her chubby cheeks, how her lips bend and mold to Katya’s. Katya has nice lips, bigger than average size, but Trixie’s lips are _really_ nice, they’re huge and have a layer of minty chapstick, she tastes like breakfast and fall air.

They just stand and kiss, for a good while, and Katya’s heart is racing by the time Trixie pulls back with a little smile. She can’t tell if she’s in too deep, can’t tell if Trixie is someone that she wants to allow inside her apartment to put up curtains and little figurines of pretty Russian girls. She’s put a little vase of wildflowers, probably from her walk from the bus stop, on Katya’s table and she’s reorganized Katya’s cups and plates in the cupboards.

When Trixie ends the kiss her lips are even pinker and Katya kisses the side of her mouth once. They settle in the armchairs and Katya puts the tiny pillow on her lap. Trixie smiles over at it and Katya can feel herself blushing, but she hardly cares.

“It looks so much better now,” Trixie sighs. Katya doesn’t comment, but she agrees, and she knows that Trixie knows she does. 

The sun is half cut off by the homey red light from the curtains, and the rooms look brighter and more lived-in than they ever have before. Katya can feel the anxiety of permanence tugging at her gut, but she’s less worried about that than she is about the cold air that’s making Trixie’s teeth chatter a little bit.

“Let me shut the windows, let’s go to the field to warm up,” Katya pushes herself up from the chair and Trixie agrees, pulls on her jacket and wraps her shawl around her head again before tying up her boots. It’s almost time for dinner and Katya has hardly realized the hours going by, so she grabs her wallet from to table and stuffs it in her back pocket after slamming all the windows shut, slips her keys into the pocket of her jacket and pulls on a green hat her mother knitted years ago.

“Let me sew up the hole in that when we get back,” Trixie says as Katya’s finger slides through it as she puts the hat on. She nods, she isn’t about to argue now that Trixie’s been too capable for it to not make Katya horny since the moment she’s awoken.

Trixie follows Katya to the field in her dirt-crusted boots, and Katya watches her pick tiny wildflowers, stick them behind her red ears. They walk around, tripping over rocks and yanking on brown grass, jumping in dirt puddles until the sun starts to go down.

“Can I buy you dinner?” Katya is sitting on a big rock. Her apartment is just in the distance, and there’s a singular truck driving along the long road out of town. Katya’s sat here many times before, reading in the sun, and Trixie’s back is braced up against her own. 

Trixie gets up, holds out a hand for Katya to take. It’s cold, her mittens are in her pockets and her fingers are bright red. Katya drops it once she’s standing but Trixie links their first fingers together, Katya holds in her smile but her heart stutters at the touching skin.

They meander through the field and back around the building to reach the sidewalk that leads to the city center, and Trixie drops her finger halfway there. Katya doesn’t blame her, anyone could see her, and Katya doesn’t really go to many lengths to hide herself in this town.

She’s a lesbian, everyone knows it. Her short hair and passion for mechanics and electronics say enough for the less accepting people that live in town or just outside to hate her, and her once brand-new, expensive car says enough about her possible origins to make her a point of interest for nearly everyone within a twenty-mile radius. 

She’s the only average citizen with a car, the only woman that everyone knows fucks women. And sure, it’s dangerous, but it could be worse. It could be so much worse, and Katya is sure that her physical strength is enough to account for at least half of the trouble she _doesn’t_ get for being gay.

But Trixie is new, she’s shiny and clean and too pretty to live here. Everyone knows it, but Katya knows it most of all. People are used to Katya, and when men walk past the two of them on the street they hardly look at her and tip their dusty hats to Trixie, offer her cigarettes.

She ignores them, gets closer to Katya each time one of them approaches, and Katya eventually pulls her inside the only restaurant she cares to visit.

“Katya!” Shea pulls her in for a tight hug just as the bell above the door quits it’s high-pitched jingle. Katya squeezes back, she’s gained dance muscle and she’s wearing more St. Petersburg perfume that Katya is sure the masculine version of is about to be delivered to her door with an entire dinner that Sasha’s made, once the both of them get their hands off of each other long enough to spend time outside of their room.

“Hi, hi,” Katya wheezes with Shea’s grip around her middle. She lets go and hugs Trixie, too, kisses her on the cheek.

“Shea, this is Trixie. She’s just moved to a farm just west of the city, and Trixie, this is Shea, my sometimes next-door neighbor,” Katya introduces them. The restaurant is fairly empty and Shea leads them to Katya’s usual table in the corner. When she comes in alone Shea will spend half her time hosting and half her time talking to Katya, even if that means yelling across the floor joyfully, Katya yelling back through a mouthful of noodles.

“Here you go, and I’ll get you some wine.” Katya takes the menus and thanks her, people are looking around the backs of chairs and up over booths to see what the ruckus is but the crowd here is usually fairly decent, there isn’t a bar for anyone to get rowdy at and Katya likes it that way, likes how the other host comes by to light the candle between them with a wink to Katya.

“It’s nice here, we don’t have a restaurant back home,” Trixie leans in, across the table like she’s sharing an important secret. Katya lets her pat her hand a few times before chugging half of her glass of water, coughing a little when she sets the glass down. 

The restaurant has red walls and all of the tables are greasy. Katya loves it, loves how comforting it is being here after a long week where she felt fairly off. It’s grounding, the way the chairs squeak and how the streetlamps shine in through the stained blinds.

Shea comes back with a basket of bread and a little bowl of prepackaged butter. Then she pulls a chair from a nearby table to sit with them, sets her elbows on the table and directs her already teasing gaze at Katya.

“So a lot’s changed since I left,” she says. Katya rolls her eyes, ignores Trixie’s giggles and ignores Shea’s laugh in response.

“Hardly,” Katya deadpans. Trixie hides behind her menu, Katya can hear her swallowing giggles still. Shea turns to Katya, taps her menu so that she’s forced to make eye contact.

“Sasha tells me you’ve got a new girl,” Shea is being obnoxious, she clearly knows that Trixie is the new girl and Katya wanted a nice meal, wanted Trixie to feel special and cared for but now she’s getting way more than she bargained for. Shea stands, pushes the chair back to it’s proper place. A line of customers has begun to grow at the door and she waves to them, gestures for them to find their own tables. 

Shea is famous for shirking her own duties but also somehow being the face of the restaurant, the person people ask after when she’s off. Katya loves her for it, she brings Sasha out of her shell and brings home food for all of them to share. But right now she hates it, wants Shea to get back to work so she’ll quit her harassment.

“Yeah, her name’s Trixie, and you’re ignoring her,” Katya snaps. She feels guilty almost immediately, but Shea is bending over with laughter and Trixie is too, and then Shea is flouncing back to the door to greet a group of ancient women bundled up in floor-length black coats.

They eat, share a bowl of whatever soup has been sitting in the kitchen and drink an entire bottle of red wine, and Katya watches Trixie’s cheeks warm up. When Katya pays it’s pitch black out, and the trucks that rattle down the street are all parked away in garages, but tall, skinny men are perched up on ledges and in doorways, smoking into the orange reflections of the streetlights. 

Trixie links her elbow with Katya’s on the short walk back, and Katya loops her finger around one of the pieces of fringe on Trixie’s shawl. The pink flowers on it look blood red in the dark, Trixie’s lips look white, and the street is filthy dirty, empty as usual. It starts to sprinkle rain just as they reach the main door of Katya’s building, and Katya ignores everyone else digging around for their mail in the lobby to pull Trixie to the stairs.

By the time they reach Katya’s apartment, Trixie’s hands are in her pockets again at the door. Katya unlocks it and they inch inside, Trixie kissing her cheek repeatedly, gently. When Katya turns on the lamp she’s taken aback by all of the changes Trixie made during the day- her living room and kitchen look like someone else’s, like Shea and Sasha’s. Like Trixie’s moved herself in.

Trixie takes off her jacket and shawl again, lets herself cuddle into a blanket on an armchair. The quiet seems heavier, thicker, but pleasantly so. It’s considerably warmer than it was when they left for the field, the heat has kicked on and Katya is tired, but not drunk, from the wine. Trixie’s lips are purple and her eyes are falling shut, she’s pulled the blanket up to her chin.

“Want to go to bed?” Katya asks, and she nods. Katya pulls her up gently by the arms, leads the way into the bedroom after turning the lights off and putting the empty cups on the table in the sink. Trixie strips down, throws the knitted blanket on the bed atop Katya’s sheets, and climbs underneath. Katya follows her once she’s naked and Trixie giggles as she turns off the light. 

The curtains block out the streetlight pretty well, and Katya groans a little when she can’t find her pack with just her hand in the darkest dark she’s ever had in this room. 

“Turn the light back on,” Trixie whispers, and Katya groans again, turns it on and squints, grips her cigarettes and lighter that she’s finally brought to her bedroom from the kitchen. No more finicky matches, she sticks a cigarette between her lips and lights it, turns the lamp off and rests the ashtray on her stomach atop the blanket.

“You’re gonna fuck me, right,” Trixie says. She’s all monotone and Katya laughs, stretches her legs out so that their toes bump.

“Of course, let me finish this,” Katya replies. Trixie nods against the pillow, turns on the mattress and presses her cold nose against Katya’s shoulder. She kisses Katya’s skin, too, where her scattered freckles are, and she wraps her fingers around her wrist. Every part of her is cold from the night and her eyes reflect the light of Katya’s cigarette.

They lie in silence as Katya smokes, and when she stubs out the cigarette Trixie’s hands are already on her breasts under the blankets as she sets it on the side table.

“Trixie,” she whispers, pulls her by the hair for a kiss. She can’t taste her for the cigarette but her mouth is much warmer than her skin, much wetter. Everything is slow and sober, the most sober Katya’s ever been while fucking her, and the long day just makes it even slower.

Trixie slides her hand up and down Katya’s stomach, she can feel her digging her fingers in to explore her abs and sides, each and every rib as they kiss. She’s lying half on top of Katya’s chest, her breasts squishes between them, one of her braided hoops of hair has fallen out, probably from Katya tugging at it.

Katya’s eyes adjust to the darkness, and she can make out the foggy outlines of Trixie’s body and face right up against hers. Trixie pulls back and breathes right into Katya’s face.

“Today was nice,” she whispers. She’s right up against Katya’s lips and they brush together a little as she speaks.

“I think so, too,” Katya whispers back. Trixie kisses her chastely, smacks their lips together before pulling the sheets up over her head and kissing down Katya’s stomach, biting her hips so that they twitch, licking up her wetness in long, slow strokes. 

Katya moans, it’s so hot under the sheets with Trixie breathing down there, and she pulls them up for a second.

“Can you, can you breathe down there,” she pants. Trixie’s already got a finger inside her and she bends it upwards so that Katya gasps. 

“No,” Trixie whines into her. Katya gets it then, moans and pulls the sheets back up, brings her hands down to Trixie’s head to dig them into her scalp as she slides another finger inside her, so that she hums against her and sucks on her a little.

All of it is blurry and sleepy, and when Katya comes she pulls Trixie up with hands under her armpits so that she can take a few breaths of cool air before Katya kisses her again, and now she can taste herself on her tongue.

“Let me,” Katya mumbles, but Trixie shakes her head. Katya runs a hand through her hair and takes Trixie’s hand from where she’s been pulling on it to hold.

“I already came,” she giggles, and Katya pulls her close, laughing onto her cheek.

She falls asleep in seconds with Trixie on top of her, with the heavy night washing over her in a kind of clean, dreamless way. Her eyelids flicker to sleep and her ears slowly warp the sounds of Trixie’s little snuffles and snores in the darkness.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Katya knows that it’s only a matter of time before they’re desperate for any food they can get. She can feel it in the tension that comes with the buzzing screen of the TV, how it crackles beneath her fingertips. She knows how it works: the blissful ignorance of the population on the inevitable demolition of the Union, the panic once it does dissolve, the desperation that will follow. Katya doesn’t want to be brewed up in it, wishes that she had left sooner, before Trixie’s fingers could dig into her hips and ground her relentlessly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all for waiting. please check the updated tags. special thanks to the anon that asked me if katya’s hair in this fic was like her pants on the runway look or like her out of drag. heavily features defensively stupid katya. the next chapter is going to be a massive commitment/undertaking but it’s due in mid October!
> 
> extra special thanks to my #1 cheerleaders on this fic, @UNHhhh and @yekaterina, i’m so happy that you love this fic as much as i do. i would be nowhere on this story without you both. there’s just no way that it would have been written, so this is 100% for you. and finally, [@Whenyourhairisalsoahood wrote fisting first, and nothing i write will ever compare. Bless you](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11933190/chapters/26973255)

It’s heavy winter the day Trixie moves in. Her hair is in two long braids, tied off with dingy brown bows. She has her mother’s earrings in, tiny dangling bits of gold against her pale, flushed skin, and she’s humming as she carries box after box through the door with Katya.

The snow has reached a foot outside, and the lower floors are having a field day with all of the wet that’s been traipsed inside. Katya is hardly affected, but sometimes she finds herself staring out the window at the falling white blankly, for sometimes hours, the TV murmuring in the background.

But Trixie has arrived, fully and completely. She has all of her things spread across Katya’s counters and bookshelves, all of her government-issue schoolbooks are seated next to Katya’s on the bookshelf, copies doubled. The curriculum hadn’t changed in their some seven years of age difference. She has all of her clothes filling Katya’s once almost-empty closet and dresser, a couple of her sweaters on top of the dresser with her collection of jewelry. She has her cheap perfume in the bathroom and her shampoo in the shower, all of her underwear and pajamas in the drawer next to Katya’s. 

She’s been helping Katya deep clean the place for the past couple of weeks, and it smells like fresh sheets and floor cleaner, every room is swept and mopped and Trixie is completely at home, especially after rolling out the huge rug in the living room.

“Now your feet won’t get cold,” Katya says, and Trixie giggles and nods at her. Katya hasn’t been able to stop smiling all day- it’s so unlike herself, getting excited about the stupidest decision she’s ever made. 

As the day goes on Trixie’s hair falls out of her braids a little, one of her ribbons gets lost in the shuffle. A thin layer of sweat covers her face and she sheds her big sweater, pushes up the sleeves of her black turtleneck. Katya kisses her up against the wall when they’re alone in the room for a couple of minutes, squeezes her hip in her jeans and pinches her cheek with her other hand. Trixie makes little noises against her mouth, pulls Katya up on her tiptoes so that she can kiss her harder.

Once Shea comes back through the door with a box of plates they stop at her groan, Katya grins wickedly at her discomfort. She slaps Trixie’s big ass so that she squeaks comically, and Shea rolls her eyes performatively, but Katya can see her happiness at the two of them. It makes her swallow the lump in her throat.

Trixie loves to keep house, Katya knows it from months of her visits. She’s stayed with Katya for long periods of time, and each time she ropes Katya into deep cleaning the chairs, the countertops, the bathtub. Katya likes to watch Trixie bent over the bathtub with her heavy hair piled atop her head, the back of her neck red with the manual labor. Katya will try to insist that she’ll do the work for her, but Trixie will protest- always winning- with the pretence that Katya works too hard at the factory to have to clean her tub.

Trixie loves to take care of her, loves to wash her entire body in the shower and rub her feet at night. Katya does her laundry and buys her treats in exchange, feeds her ice cream and candy when she gets home from work and wants to sit with her feet up for a second, before Trixie gets all over her naked.

Trixie and Shea are best friends, the fastest friends, they sit together at the table and whisper about Katya and Sasha as they all eat dinner once Trixie’s belongings are placed around the apartment carefully. Trixie has about the same amount of stuff that Katya does, that they all have, but instead of shitty novels and records she has clothes and jewelry, little trinkets that Katya actually likes to see amongst her bare-bones living area. It all fits, and Katya hates it much less than she thought she would.

Trixie’s snagged a job at the grocery store, and she takes Katya’s insistence that it’ll be a ration supply center soon enough with a grain of salt. Trixie lives in the moment, and Katya’s shifted to the side about it, she’s shifted from hating it a little to accepting that it’s the way she does things, the way she’s wired. And now she thinks it’s charming, how Trixie finds excitement in the tiniest little things. Katya finds caring exhausting, but she could watch Trixie’s eyes light up with discovery every single day and it would still feel beautiful and new.

Katya feels like she was made to care for a woman.

Trixie has limited boundaries with herself and Katya and the world around her. And in someone else, someone Katya wasn’t so taken with, she might hate it. But with Trixie it’s too different to not keep her up at night. Trixie is too beautiful, too greedy in all the most wonderful ways. Katya wants to give her everything, buy her the world and ensure that she’s always happy, always fed, always satisfied.

She wants to feel like sometimes she has to try and rein her in, she likes Trixie teasing her and pushing her boundaries until Katya is stuffing her mouth shut with her fingers and rubbing her relentlessly so that she’s oversensitive and shaking.

Trixie is so dirty, she’s at her happiest when Katya is calling her bad and fucking her hard and slow. She likes to crawl across the floor to lick at Katya’s pussy as she sits on the armchair, kneel until her pretty knees are bruised and her big thighs are trembling with holding herself up. Katya can hold her hands tight in her hair and it’ll make her moan even more against Katya’s damp inner thighs. It surprises her, how excited Trixie is to fuck her. 

Most of the women Katya’s fucked were looking for a single-night stress reliever, an easy pain eraser.And it hasn’t been terrible, but it hasn’t been great, either. She loves to take care of a woman-- she gets off on it-- but if a woman doesn’t have enough interest to take care of _her_ right back the mood is dampened and Katya’s meager sense of self-worth trails right down the drain. 

And Trixie is so different. Trixie _wants_ her, and half of the time Katya has no idea what to do with that information. Trixie holds her hand while they watch TV sometimes, and she pulls Katya into the tiny shower to wash the grease and dust off of her after a long day at work. Katya rarely does that for herself, she usually falls asleep covered in it and creaks to the shower in the morning.

But Trixie likes it. She likes her, Katya can see her staring at her arms a lot. Trixie watches her with wide eyes, she says things that she thinks Katya will like. She calls her her handsome husband, she asks her if she can lick up her thighs. She sets her hands gently cupping the backs of Katya’s knees and kisses her stomach with her sticky chapstick.

She loves to unbutton Katya from her coveralls. She likes to have Katya still in them, absolutely filthy from work, fucking her with just-scrubbed hands bent over the table. And Katya does it, still in her heavy boots and aching all over, because it gets Trixie so wet and so whiny, naked and practically sobbing for Katya to stuff her full.

Katya works long and hard every single day, and ever since the morning where she left Trixie sound asleep in her bed she’s been unintentionally (or intentionally but a bit loathingly) pulling more cash out of her paychecks to spend it on Trixie. She buys all the fruit she can to stock the apartment, she finds herself at the store spending a month’s purposeful savings on a beautiful shawl for Trixie once her favorite one gets ripped on a branch in the field. 

Trixie has a built-in expectation to be spoiled, and Katya can’t help how her unquestioning acceptance of Katya’s gifts turns her on. Katya finds herself in bed with Trixie falling asleep next to her rubbing herself off just hours after Katya gifted her the shawl, wrapped in newspaper but folded as best she could. Trixie watched her finger herself with a wry smile, blushing and sleepy, too tired to even kiss Katya but more than happy to watch her get off as she fell asleep. It was one of the hottest things Katya has ever done.

Trixie has an inflated sense of self-worth, a dangerous recklessness that allowed her to get wasted on wine and traipse to Katya’s apartment three days before moving in through heavy snow, in the dark night. Katya opened the door for her and took her into her arms, let her laugh and laugh at Katya’s hair pulled up into a tiny bun atop her head, and had pulled her into bed where she promptly passed out.

That night, Katya had laid in her bed with Trixie on her usual side, her bare back against the cold wall, and watched her breathe so that her hair blew up and down with the wind of her breath. She had felt so guilty, in that moment. Guilty for allowing Trixie to move in, guilty for leading her on when she was still set on leaving.

Trixie won’t be able to ask her to say. She’ll be able to ask, but Katya will refuse. 

Katya had hardly said a word about Trixie moving in with her. She had weaseled her way into Katya’s apartment ever since the day she had started redecorating, had earned her stay by bringing Katya leftovers from the farm. Katya had quickly learned about Trixie’s family and their uncaring focus on the farm, their unparalleled devotion and trust of the government because of their own position and luck with it.

Trixie had sat aside, had allowed them to make the arrangements of privatized farming as she fumed about the willful cooperation she so hates. Katya had laughed at her raw anger, her disregard for familial love and affection in exchange for sheer detachment. Trixie will go on about how she was never hugged as a child, how she was given everything she wanted but impersonally, all of her theories for why she has such a disregard for all of them. 

Katya doesn’t know why she feels nothing for them. It’s unsettling, sometimes, how she ignores them and writes them off, how they don’t seem to care that she’s gone at all hours of the night and day. She has a job, but Katya can guess that her four brothers and parents probably take care of the farm better and more diligently than Trixie ever could. Trixie is a little lazy, only motivated by her own wants and needs.

And that’s more than a tiny bit sexy, Katya can’t help but admit to herself.

The night Trixie moves in she sneaks into bed in a silky slip, cream lace trim still darker than her pale skin. Katya is already cold, but Trixie’s body is hot, soft and heavy next to hers. It’s been dark for hours, polar night’s fingers reaching further down the country, in a watered-down version. The apartment smells cleaner than it has in years, and Katya has a fleeting moment where she can feel her own sense of calm and settled soul.

And then she’s wide awake, Trixie snoring gently beside her, staring blankly at the curtains, heart in her throat.

“Fuck.”

It’s colder at the end of the bed, next to the window. Katya sleeps naked through all sorts of weather, but right now she wishes that she was in her childhood bedroom, swaddled in blankets and sweaters. She shakes off the thought with a full-body shiver.

Frost is gathering on the window with the freezing night. She pulls the curtains back as far as she dares, so as to not wake Trixie with the light from the streetlamp, how it seems brighter in the darker winter night, reflecting off of the gray snow.

Winter is always suffocating. The air is too cold to breathe, the gas from the factories seems to bloom down the streets instead of up into the clouds. Katya thinks that the clouds are probably too heavy to accept it into them, too full of snow and sleet so that the chemicals bounce off of them and right up Katya’s nostrils.

She lights a joint even though she’s afraid that it’ll wake Trixie, smokes it with her legs crossed at the end of the bed. She doesn’t work tomorrow but it’s still 1am, she should be sleeping so that they can finish cleaning and get rid of the boxes first thing in the morning.

But cleaning and getting rid of boxes seems like permanence.

Katya’s never been more afraid of tethers than she is right now. And she’s never been so afraid of _Trixie_. She’s terrified of Trixie waking up in the morning, terrified of Trixie looking into her eyes and seeing just how fucking ruined she is, just how much of her life consists of mindless waiting. She’s terrified of Trixie’s blue eyes looking right through her, seeing every single one of her faults in stark contrast to her strong body and supportive tendencies.

Katya is neurotic and detached. 

It’s getting colder but Katya is getting higher, and by the time she finishes the joint her body is buzzing and she can lie back down next to Trixie, feel warm despite it probably being ten degrees cooler than when she extracted herself from the blanket.

“You done?” Trixie whispers, and Katya gasps, jumps a little.

“You were awake this whole time?” Katya turns to face her, puts a freezing hand to her chubby cheek. Her skin is warm, glowing in the light from the curtains Katya forgot to close. She sighs and lifts her face further into Katya’s palm. Katya wants to cry. She’s higher than she thought she was, and her gut is twisting at the idea of kissing Trixie’s sweet mouth.

“Don’t worry,” Trixie whispers. She pulls Katya closer, rests her head on her chest, and Katya falls asleep with Trixie’s hair over her eyes.

-

“Trixie?” Katya opens the bathroom door a crack, she can hear the water turn off in the kitchen and Trixie’s steps to the bedroom.

“Yeah?” Katya has a towel slung across her shoulders, in just underwear and Trixie’s tank top. She’d put it on and instantly drowned in it, it’s odd having another person’s clothes filling her drawers but she likes how the stretched material hangs loosely over her chest, falls past her hips. It smells like Trixie, and when Trixie peeks through the bathroom door at Katya she sees it and giggles.

“Can you help me?” Katya points to her own head. Her brows fly up and she takes them out of Katya’s hand, pushes the door open as Katya sits on the closed toilet.

“Your hair?” Trixie puts both hands on her shoulders. Katya smiles up at her, and Trixie’s eyes scan the sink where Katya’s already dropped a tiny chunk of blonde, regrettably cut by the kitchen scissors. “Did you fuck it up?” 

Trixie giggles and Katya rolls her eyes. Trixie gets a perverse thrill from Katya being vulnerable and needing her, and the way that Katya’s seated allowing her to cut her hair off is the perfect scene- Trixie’s dream of settling Katya in bed like her very own baby, singing her to sleep and kissing her on her eyelids once she does.

“No, I just think you would be better. Here’s the clipper,” Katya twists her waist to take it off the back of the toilet, settles it in Trixie’s waiting fingers.

“You want me to use _this_?” Trixie flips it on and jumps a little at how it vibrates. Katya laughs at her wide eyes.

“You’ve used plenty of heavy farm equipment, yeah? This isn’t much different,” Katya replies. Trixie nods, slides her hand across the side of her head.

“How short?” She asks. Katya closes her eyes as Trixie pushes her baby hairs out of them, bares her forehead.

“Short. I trust you.”

Trixie hums, starts buzzing Katya’s hair slowly with fingers softly cupping the back of her neck. Katya closes her eyes, lets Trixie run her fingers across the longer part she’s kept at the top, push it to the side and shuffle the little clippings of hair that have stuck to the other strands.

“Thanks.” Katya stands when she’s done, after she lifts the towel so that none of Katya’s hair falls onto the floor. “Much better.”

“You look hot,” Trixie whispers. Katya snorts, pulls her close by the upper arms. She’s still holding the towel-full of hair between them, and Katya takes it from her hands, places it on the floor next to the trash bin.

“Do I?” Trixie giggles, once Katya straightens back up she’s up in Katya’s face, wide blue eyes too big to take in at so close a proximity. Katya wraps her hands around her waist.

“You do,” Trixie states seriously. Katya grins, kisses her lips as gently as she can possibly stand. It isn’t enough for her, as usual, Trixie always takes and gets what she wants. Katya has no problem giving it, but sometimes she likes to see her beg and squirm. So when Trixie tries to push her lips harder against Katya’s, she pulls back a little, laughs through her nose so that Trixie pouts against her lips, whimpers in indignation.

“Katya.”

“What,” Katya whispers. She kisses right under Trixie’s ear, the cool metal of her earring kissing Katya’s skin back. Trixie shifts on her socked feet.

“Please. Please,” she whispers. The bathroom light is dim, and it flickers as it sometimes does right at the end of her sentence. It used to spook Katya when she lived alone, now Trixie just sighs about how much she wants Katya to try and fix it.

“You want to go to bed?” Katya asks. Trixie nods up-and-down, twice, hand tight on Katya’s shoulder. She’s already curling into Katya like she does in the middle of the night sometimes, unconsciously. Her toes will bump Katya’s in the darkness and she’ll huff a little snore, and then her hair will be covering Katya’s face and her huge breasts will be under Katya’s chin.

Trixie pulls her in with both hands on her ass, tight against her soft body. Katya hums, lets her hold her against her for a few seconds before pulling back and leading her into the bedroom.

Trixie sits on the bed and it squeaks, echoes as Katya sits next to her. Her hands are on Katya’s head instantly, pulling her face forwards to kiss her, and Katya climbs on top of her on the creaking springs of the mattress.

“I like taking care of you,” Trixie breathes. Katya gulps and watches Trixie blink, her honest eyes beneath her lashes and pink lids. “You’re so handsome.”

All of the air rushes out of Katya’s nose and she can’t help but kiss her as hard as she can, as tight as she can. Trixie laughs behind her cheeks, and Katya can’t bring herself to smile back at her. Her stomach is swirling and her eyes are blurring, she can’t stop kissing Trixie over and over and over. 

Her hands are clenched in Trixie’s hair and the blonde strands are cool against her hot palms. Katya can feel her stomach under her own, her ass is on Trixie’s hips and Trixie’s breasts are falling to the sides and squishing against her arms.

She’s just so bright and alive beneath Katya, her soft muscles and dimples. She has two dimples at her lower back above her ass. Katya can’t stand it, how Trixie squirms and grips her breasts and keeps trying to pull her in closer and closer. She’s everything that Katya has dreamed of in exaggerated senses, her wide hips and blonde curls and how she smokes on an armchair with her knees pulled up to her chest, little feet curving with the seat. It’s like someone perverted and sneaky took all of Katya’s fantasies and blew them up life-size, and gave her a wild disposition and whiny speech on top of it all.

“And you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” Trixie smiles up at her once Katya’s gathered herself and pulled away from her lips. Her scent fades in and out, and Katya heaves the words out slowly in her face. Katya is too slow to keep up with her but she’s damn well trying, she’s got herself situated on her stomach so that she won’t take things into her own hands and overwhelm her all over again.

“Thank you,” she says. Katya grins, kisses her quickly. She’s wet, rubbing down on Trixie’s stomach. She doesn’t know how long she’s been trying to get off on her body’s own time, but she can’t blame herself. Trixie’s skin is flushing and her pale shoulders are almost the exact cream of the new pillowcase. “I like your new hair.”

Katya laughs, brings her fingers down to tickle Trixie’s sides, at her white t-shirt right under her breasts, so that she squeals and grips Katya’s hands with her own. 

“Don’t!” She shrieks when Katya dislodges her hands from her grip and tries to tickle her skin again. She listens, brings her hands up to Trixie’s chubby cheeks and squeezes them, pinches the soft soft skin with a light layer of soft blonde hairs reflecting in the light.

“The most beautiful woman,” she whispers. Trixie’s eyes flutter and her mouth opens a little-- Katya is close enough to her that she’s getting a little slack-jawed, a little dazed, and Katya feels the same way. She slips her thumb into Trixie’s mouth and Trixie’s lips close around it instantly, her tongue slides over it. Katya is shivering from the winter cold of the window’s glass, Trixie’s tongue on her thumbprint, how hot Trixie’s skin is beneath hers.

Katya can’t believe that she gets to know her. She can’t believe that Trixie wants to fuck her.

“Can I fuck you?”

She feels like she has to ask. But when the words come out she wishes that Trixie would smack her on the cheek instead of giving her a confused look, head cocking to the side.

“Of course you can.” Katya’s finger falls from her mouth as she says it.

Katya kisses her again to touch her lips, but Trixie pulls back.

“Of course you can,” she says again, enunciating the syllables, eyes wide, so that Katya nods at her command, loses her entire plan in her eyes and body beneath her. 

Katya kisses her and brings hands to her waist to pull her shirt up and over her head. Her bra is pretty but old, one of the ones she wears around the house. Katya’s heart thumps so loud that she’s certain Trixie can hear it at the thought, she’s suddenly nervous and Trixie is looking at her so gently that she wants to scream, run away while she still can.

Katya bites her lower lip, nods, giggles at Trixie’s desperate nodding. A switch has flipped, Trixie is squirming more beneath her and Katya wants to tease her orgasm out of her, as slowly as she can.

“Katya! Touch me,” Trixie shrieks. Katya laughs outright, and Trixie sobs a few times in frustration. She always wants so badly and Katya always gives it to her- she’s too pretty for her to not.

“Where,” Katya says. Trixie is breathing so heavily that it’s distracting her, and she’s dripping down her inner thighs like she always does. It’s getting Katya’s cheeks wet.

“Please, I need it,” Trixie gasps. Katya loosens her grip on the back of her knee and brings her hand to Trixie’s pale collarbone, pinching a tight nipple on the way. Katya wants to suck on every single vein in her big breasts, the ones that cross the pale skin of them through her nipples.

“I know you need it,” Katya says. “Don’t be silly. If you don’t tell me what you want you won’t get it.”

Trixie cries out as Katya brings a nipple into her mouth, the pull of her heavy breast causing friction where she’s sucking hard, scraping her teeth against the thin skin. Katya can feel the sweat under her breast, she sticks her hand beneath it so that it’s surrounded by Trixie’s hot, damp skin. 

“So sweet,” Katya says as she releases Trixie’s nipple from her mouth. “Come on.”

Trixie’s blonde curls are shiny across the pillow and there’s a tiny bead of sweat crawling down her cheek next to her ear. Katya presses her lips to it, wonders if Trixie has to breathe harder and deeper because Katya is sitting atop her, ass pressing down on her stomach. Trixie is bigger than her but Katya knows that she’s all muscle, and she can hear how Trixie’s breaths are getting shallower with arousal and Katya blocking her airways.

“Katya, fill me up,” Trixie whines. Katya laughs into her mouth, and Trixie gasps a breath. 

“Am I too heavy?” Katya grins against her. Trixie whimpers and her hand drops from Katya’s face down on the bed. Katya grinds her ass down onto her, a little of the friction from Trixie’s soft belly making her groan through her teeth. “Am I crushing you?” 

Trixie shakes her head, and Katya laughs again, climbs up and off of her to crawl further down the sheets. 

“Are you wet?” Katya asks, Trixie sobs at the question. Her hips shift and squirm and Katya’s eyes almost cross with how her hands go right to her pelvis, fingers inching towards her wetness. Katya stares her down, and she doesn’t touch. “Hm?”

“I’m so wet,” Trixie cries. Katya rolls her eyes, Trixie’s thighs are clenching and her toes are turned in like they do when she stands, ankles rolled on the sheets. Her skin is winter-flushed. Katya grips her shins, scrapes her nails against the furiously moisturized skin and the prickly blonde hairs growing in. Trixie sighs, shifts her hips upwards. 

Katya slowly pulls her legs apart, opening her up so that she shivers from the cool air against her. She knows Trixie’s agenda and she’s trying not to allow for her to see how much she loves it, but she doubts that Trixie has the conscious ability to focus on Katya’s inner monologue.

“Katya, I can do it this time, please.” Katya scoffs, pulls up to kiss her tummy and stuffs her face into its warmth for a good second. She can feel Trixie’s hitching breaths from the source, and she can’t stop herself from whimpering into her skin. Trixie’s hands clamp around her head. “Please.”

“Alright,” Katya says. Trixie giggles in delight and it sends a sharp note of pleasure through Katya’s stomach. “Get settled.”

Trixie squirms into a more comfortable position once Katya pulls back from her, sits up on her heels. Her tired thighs stretch in the position and Trixie watches her wince.

“You want to sleep?” She asks, eyes wide. Katya can’t help but feel a toxic mixture of pride and tenderness at the suggestion, but she can’t imagine doing anything else in this moment but fucking Trixie exactly how she’s desperate to be fucked. She shakes her head and Trixie’s smile grows again, making Katya’s stomach turn with arousal.

“I’m going to fill you up,” Katya grunts, pulls Trixie’s hips towards her just a little more. She can lift Trixie around no problem, and every single time she does it Trixie’s eyes darken, her legs open up a little more for Katya to stuff herself between them.

The first time Trixie had begged for Katya to slide her entire hand inside her, wide palm and calloused fingers, it had been something of an accident. Well, as much of an accident as something that was planned and rehearsed in Trixie’s head beforehand, no doubt.

She had cried for more, more, more, to the point where Katya had four fingers and the tip of her thumb inside her and then she had come twitching around them. Katya had felt so much more than before how her insides flexed with pleasure, how her smooth, wet skin had breathed along with her chest. Once Katya had pulled all of her fingers out Trixie had gripped her wrist deathly tight, had taken her fingers straight into her mouth and sucked them down, moaning around all four of them in the space between her teeth and cheeks.

Katya had whispered that _soon I’ll be able to put my whole hand up inside you_ , and Trixie had whimpered, tried to kiss Katya through all of her fingers still on her tongue.

Katya knows that Trixie has been stretching herself out while Katya is at work, knows when she comes home to Trixie all tired out from her day off. She hasn’t brought it up, but she knows that Trixie knows that _she_ knows, and that’s hotter than it ever would be had she brought it up. So she pretends like Trixie isn’t able to take her a little deeper each time, like she doesn’t smell like her own soaking pussy when Katya gets home and kisses her with grease on her lips.

“You’ve been practicing for me,” Katya says into her hip, pressing four fingers tight together against her opening so that Trixie tries to shift down onto them. “Be patient!”

Trixie whimpers and Katya bites her stomach so that she gasps, swallows loudly as Katya starts to push her fingers deeper inside. She keeps her thumb along with them and can smell Trixie’s sweat starting to appear across her body in front of Katya.

Trixie is giving out a long, achey moan and she doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon. Katya’s waist feels tight with her own arousal, her stomach is clenched tight against the bed, her side pressed to Trixie’s fat thigh.

She’s so wet around Katya’s fingers, she’s so horny at the thought that Katya’s hand will be up inside her fully for the first time and then many times again after. Katya wants her loose for her, open and aching for Katya to fill her up whenever they’re apart. Katya shudders as Trixie gives way to her fingers, her knuckles stretch her so far that Katya doubts that it’ll work until she’s pulling Katya’s hand inside, yelling a broken moan as Katya pushes the rest of the way inside.

“Katya,” Trixie can barely breathe, can hardly say her name. She’s limp on the sheets, her stomach is fluttering and Katya can feel how she expands and contracts with each and every breath. “Katya.”

“Can I move?” Katya asks, her voice is shot and dry and she has to clear her throat because she’s certain that Trixie can’t hear her. “Can I move.”

“Wait,” Trixie cries, but then her hips shift downward and she gasps, moans so loudly in the quiet that it makes Katya blink and flinch. “Move.”

Katya twists her wrist where it’s encircled by Trixie’s tight opening, opens her fingers a little so that she can see Trixie’s eyes roll far back to the back of her head. She’s still moaning, whispering Katya’s name repeatedly, tightening and loosening so hot around her hand. 

The tendons of Katya’s forearm are twisting beneath her skin, and her hand is all the way up inside Trixie. She sits still for three full seconds just to bask in it, to ground herself in the moment.

“Katya, _more_ ,” Trixie says, and Katya pushes her fingers forward and back, thrusts in and out with such a loud, wet noise coming from Trixie’s insides that Katya can’t contain her own moan. “Fuck!”

Katya rocks her fist in and out four more times, pushing and twisting her wrist so that she drags and sticks inside of Trixie, and then Trixie is screaming and clenching her teeth and coming so hard and so tight that Katya yelps, tries to pull her hand out on reflex until Trixie releases her grip a little.

When Trixie has come down a little Katya slides her hand out, slowly through the tight ring of muscle, pulling through each time it catches on her. 

“Baby,” Katya whispers against her stomach, holds her soaking hand against Trixie’s hot side. Trixie pulls her up with shaking arms, holds her tight to her chest and trails her warm fingers down Katya’s still-clenched stomach to her wet curls, rubs her through her orgasm as she kisses her so sweetly Katya feels like she’s going to crumble into table salt atop her.

-

“Katya?” Trixie is still in bed, and Katya can hear her shift around as her toast pops out of the toaster. “Did you see your lunchbag?”

Katya’s eyes flick to the kitchen counter where the brown paper bag is sitting. She had passed out early the night before with Trixie watching TV in the living room, the middle of the work week too exhausting for sex or even conversation. Trixie works less hours than her, mainly because Katya’s hours are fairly inflexible and already allow for the apartment, and the both of them to eat. Trixie’s added income gives Katya the freedom to stow away more cash under the bed. 

Trixie sprawls out on the bed in the early mornings when Katya is getting ready, watches her shower with the door wide open, wash her face and get dressed with a steady, sleepy smile. Katya lets her eyes roll all over her body, lets her stare at her ass and thighs and bare breasts. 

Trixie must have made her lunch last night after she went to bed. Trixie yawning in the kitchen, cutting her bread for a sandwich and probably sliding a cookie in there, too. 

Katya knows that it’s only a matter of time before they’re desperate for any food they can get. She can feel it in the tension that comes with the buzzing screen of the TV, how it crackles beneath her fingertips. She knows how it works: the blissful ignorance of the population on the inevitable demolition of the Union, the panic once it does dissolve, the desperation that will follow. Katya doesn’t want to be brewed up in it, wishes that she had left sooner, before Trixie’s fingers could dig into her hips and ground her relentlessly.

But Trixie is one of those citizens. She allows herself to live her life with a focus on her surroundings, she has little dissociation when it comes to society and the establishment. It drives Katya up all of the walls, curses her own disposition to view the government as a false prop. She’s worked hard all her life, has grinded her bones down with a power drill, and all of it will be for nothing if Trixie convinces her that lunches she makes before work mean prosperity, and love, and have _meaning_ in a veritable hellscape.

Trixie can get angry, _real_ angry at the political reality. Katya’s seen it, her blue eyes flashing with unshed tears and her mouth tight with rage as they listen to the news. She likes to make dinner while Katya sits listening to the radio, and sometimes she’ll drop a pan, cut herself with a knife with a loss of physical control at the lies that are released almost musically from the reporter’s mouth.

But that anger is so different from Katya’s nihilism. It allows attachment and passion, and Katya has neither of those.

“Thank you, baby.” Trixie is behind her, wrapping her warm-almost-hot arms around her in the morning darkness. She kisses Katya’s neck and traces the goosebumps with her fingertips, pulls Katya’s jaw towards her to kiss her on the lips. 

“Have a good day, please,” Trixie says. Katya kisses her again, breathes in deep through her nose to smell the sleep on her, the womanly skin smell that Trixie gets with tiredness. It makes her lungs ache. “Or try your best.”

Katya laughs and pulls her around, kisses her hard in replacement for needing to promise that she’ll try. Trixie’s mouth opens gracefully beneath Katya’s stumbling lips, her soft body wraps Katya’s in warmth that she knows she’ll be able to feel all day long.

She’ll sit and drill away, screw on more finicky bolts, and then her chest will ache with the reminder of Trixie’s big breasts against it. It’ll make her fingers twitch, she’ll drop something on the ground and need to pick it back up, she’ll put the line behind for a full second.

“I need to go, now,” Katya whispers. Trixie nods, kisses her cheek and slaps her butt as she walks away, and Katya can hear her start to fiddle with the coffee pot as she closes the door behind her. She can never fall back asleep once Katya’s left.

Katya stomps through the gray slush in the parking lot, ignoring her blush that started with Trixie’s little spank, shoo-ing a malnourished street cat away from her back tire as she unlocks her front door. She looks up, can’t help herself, and Trixie is looking out the window in the darkness, the shadow of her curvy body cutting an outline in the glass with the lamp behind her. She doesn’t wave until Katya does, and when she does Katya can feel it heavy inside her, the palm of Trixie’s hand hot against hers.

When Katya comes home and wraps Trixie in her arms she kisses her selfishly, squeezes her cheeks and earlobes between her fingers. They lie in bed and smoke four cigarettes each. The snow will suffocate both of them in sleep- it’s been snowing steadily for four days and Katya would wake any given morning unsurprised at the snow reaching their window from the ground.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Katya loves to pound her feet into the pavement, loves to stretch her muscles and carry her own weight across the twelve miles of road, there and back. The bleak, snow-covered world around her begs to be ignored with it’s dead trees and emptiness, the sun shines unforgivingly in her eyes and makes green pictures in the blood of her eyelids when she stops for breaks and closes them. She loves to ache afterwards, loves to feel her legs screaming for relief.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place a year past the last chapter. That would set this in the winter (December) of 1991. To make everything very clear, Trixie and Katya meet in the fall of 1989, Trixie moves in the winter of 1989/1990. There are tentatively two chapters due after this one! Big thanks to some outside inspiration for this chapter: The Well of Loneliness by John R. Hall (a few references in homage, let me know if you clue in on them), The National (a band full of butch anthems), Female Masculinity by Jack Halberstam, and the concept of the deadline.
> 
> A very big happy birthday to my best friend, partner-in-crime, and overall icon [@UNHhhh](http://archiveofourown.org/users/UNHhhh/pseuds/UNHhhh/works). I love you and I hope you love this as much as I do (I know you will)! And on that note: if you are reading/enjoying this fic and have not read [Busted Saddles](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11212704/chapters/25048362), you are missing out! I delight at the similarities between the two on the daily, to say the absolute least.

In early December Katya finds herself running along the road that connects her town to the next. It’s six miles long, she runs to the first street of Trixie’s hometown and turns back in her gray sweatpants, her faded sweatshirt. The cold seeps through them, it’s a dry cold that shakes her bones and refuses her any kind of relative warmth, even once she’s been running long enough for her blood to start pumping.

Katya loves to pound her feet into the pavement, loves to stretch her muscles and carry her own weight across the twelve miles of road, there and back. The bleak, snow-covered world around her begs to be ignored with it’s dead trees and emptiness, the sun shines unforgivingly in her eyes and makes green pictures in the blood of her eyelids when she stops for breaks and closes them. She loves to ache afterwards, loves to feel her legs screaming for relief.

She runs until she’s tired herself out, pulls herself up the stairs panting, enters the apartment to a full breakfast from Trixie, who’s seated at the table on the creaking chair, reading the paper.

Trixie is lethargic in the mornings, her laziness seeps through the morning hours and the night hours more than midday. She loves to sleep, wants to be perpetually cuddled under blankets or on their new couch in a soft, red sweater and threadbare sweats, snoring gently. She thrives in the light of the cold winter sun that shines on her moon-reflective face as she sleeps the hours away on the couch, and Katya will sometimes sit and watch her out of the corner of her eye as she reads in the armchair.

The moments with Trixie quietly resting are the moments that feel the most peaceful, the moments that Katya doesn’t mind being idle inside of. Katya’s skin is dry against her sweaters and jeans, the reading glasses that Trixie insists she wear perched on her nose. 

Although the cold winter makes Katya’s toes ache, she wears the socks that Trixie buys her, that Trixie mends once she’s worn through them, and sits quietly so that Trixie can nap. She often finds herself drifting off as well, falling into a light sleep on the armchair, glasses sliding down her nose to fall in her lap.

Her energy is restored with breakfast, and she might enjoy their little quiet moments, but she has no desire to sleep through the Saturday. Trixie is yawning into her coffee across from her, slowly turning the pages of the paper and huffing as she spills a little on the news section. Katya clears her throat so that Trixie looks up, blinks sleepily at her as if she’s seeing her for the first time, as if she’s a stranger in Trixie’s home. It sends the tiniest thrill up Katya’s spine.

“Let’s go out today,” Katya grumbles. Her voice is half-gone from the cold and disuse, and Trixie’s lips pull into a wry smile.

“I’m tired,” she says. Katya wants to go easy, Trixie’s been covering shifts all week, but _she_ has a far more demanding job and still has the urge to move around on the weekends. She doesn’t get it. And Trixie is so sexy, curled up on the chair across from her, begging for a nap, but Katya doesn’t want to keep encouraging her. She sighs anyways.

“We’ll watch TV, then. And no sleeping! Just resting. I want to talk to you,” Katya says honestly. She longs for Trixie’s cutting commentary at the television, wants to laugh and kiss her through the boring part of a movie. She knows that Trixie watches soap operas with Shea during the week, knows that she has the _capability_ to watch television and talk at the same time. Katya’s seen it, and she wants to be entertained. She’d even settle for fucking her on the couch in the middle of it. Whatever would keep Trixie happy and engaged, Katya wants it.

Trixie nods, yawns again so that Katya can’t help but catch it. She hasn’t showered but she sits on the couch in her stinky and sweaty clothes, spreads her legs and pulls the blanket from the arm to rest it on her stomach. Trixie wanders over behind her, stretching up and rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. She leaves the paper on the table next to the couch, knows that Katya will want to read it.

She settles herself gently between Katya’s legs, butt further down the couch so that her head is resting on Katya’s stomach, shoulders across her hips.

“You aren’t going to sleep like that, are you?” Katya says. Trixie shakes her head, watches the TV that’s crackling on a shitty soap opera, the kind that she’s bound to complain about. “You better not.”

Trixie laughs, and Katya squeezes her shoulder in her fuzzy sweater. She’s heavy and warm on Katya’s lower half, her hair is falling across Katya’s stomach.

“You stink,” she mumbles. Katya pulls on a few curls so that she grunts, slides her butt a little further down the couch. As the show continues and Katya picks up the newspaper from the side table, she can see how Trixie is nodding off, her eyes closing for a few seconds at a time before fluttering open again, squinting. Katya swallows her laugh and pulls herself up the couch with her elbows, and Trixie’s head falls right between her legs. 

“Katya,” she whines. Katya laughs, pulls her right thigh out from under her to rest it over her shoulder, her muscular calf settled atop her breasts. Trixie’s head is right between her thighs in her now-dry sweatpants, and she still hasn’t properly woken up to complain about it. Katya hums, runs her fingers through Trixie’s hair, rubbing her scalp gently so that she sniffles and squishes her cheeks against Katya’s inner thighs.

“Comfy?” Katya whispers. Trixie shakes her head but takes the time to turn her body to it’s side, so that her face is pressed right up to Katya’s crotch. Katya can feel her hot breath warming her pants, her underwear. She sighs, pets her hair again, tightens her thighs and turns to the next page of the article she’s in the middle of. “You wake up anytime.”

Trixie sighs in response, rubs her nose up and down across Katya’s sweatpants. Katya shivers, her sweat has dried past the point of being uncomfortable- she could sit like this all day, suffocating Trixie between her thighs in retribution for her resistance at joining awake, living society. Katya opens the blanket that has some of Trixie’s blonde hair attached to it with static, throws it over her legs and over Trixie’s head, keeps a hand curled around the cool hair at her temples, her warm scalp comforting beneath her fingers.

“You’re ridiculous,” she says, loudly enough that Trixie’s eyes open, squint up at her through lashes. Trixie smiles against her, causing a tiny shiver to travel up her spine, and Katya ignores her as much as she can stand with her hot breath and her soft stomach against her knee for the rest of the morning, until she taps Trixie’s ear and yanks down her pants, squeezes her tighter so that she sucks on her clit lazily, pinches her nose shut every once in a while so that she gasps for breath between her lips, cheeks squished between Katya’s strong thighs.

-

A machine breaks at the factory two weeks later and Katya is sent home early, along with everyone else that works the assembly lines. There’s no use staying when a part won’t attach itself to any of the cars, no use in making a car if it can’t be made.

Katya feels vividly alive, to be let go three hours early. She climbs into the car a lot less sore than usual, a lot less exhausted. And this shift in regular mood schedule inspires her to take a trip to the store on the way back home with her newfound energy, to surprise Trixie with ice cream for dinner. She’s off work, meaning that Katya can buy all the treats she wants without Trixie seeing them in the checkout line as she counts Katya’s items and bags them under fluorescent lighting.

The winter is unusually warm, Katya feels. As she walks from the car to the store the wind is considerably less biting, and she hates her view of the bleak horizon a little less than she usually does. The sun is set, but the streetlamps’ yellow light is inviting, cuts the cold lighting of the grocery store enough that it doesn’t irritate Katya’s eyes like usual. The thick puddles of ice in the cracks and slopes of the lot look deep and black, almost beautiful with how they reflect the lamps. 

When she gets home Trixie will be there, cuddled up in blankets. She gets cold in the winter like Katya rarely does, and Katya loves to keep Trixie in her lap to keep her warm. Trixie will be waiting for her, and Katya will kiss her hello, and then she’ll feed Trixie ice cream with a spoon across the side table as they watch TV or listen to the news on the radio. She hopes that Trixie will be excited that she’s back early, hopes that she’ll like the ice cream.

Katya’s had a big pit in her stomach, heavy and sharp, for the past few months. It’s grown over the past few years, but ‘91 seems to be the year that everything will really, truly, come to a head. She thinks about it when she’s fucking Trixie, even, when she’s four fingers deep in her woman she finds herself foggily imagining some kind of future where she can make it to the United States unpunished, where maybe, just _maybe_ the borders will be knocked down so that Katya can stroll right across them, in a big airplane with or without Trixie by her side.

And then Trixie will slap her across the face, _hard_ , laugh at her to pay attention, and Katya will pull herself back down to ground, back down to Russia and back to Trixie’s beautiful pink pussy dripping right before her very eyes.

Katya makes a mental note to make sure to eat Trixie out tonight. Sometime after the ice cream, when she’s lying in bed full and comfortable. She carries the light bags out to the car and throws them in the backseat, taking extra care not to knock the headrest off of the passenger side again. The car is falling apart, and Katya wishes that there was some other, better way for her to fix it. It’s just too old, it’s lived with her for almost thirty-two years, and there’s not much she can do for it anymore. Stolen parts can only do so much- everything needs to be replaced at some point. She’s replaced everything that possibly can be.

It’s just another box to tick off, another item to add to the list of why leaving is an imperative. Everything is fucking sub-par, everything is broken-down or wasted. Katya wouldn’t hate living in a world where she could fix shiny, cheap cars that _work_ for people just like her. She wants to buy a fancy new car the moment she sets her feet on land, wants to go on a five hour drive through the clean countryside, just feeling the hum of the strong engine propelling her.

She doesn’t allow herself imagining Trixie there with her, her thighs in tiny shorts spread across the seat, gripping Katya’s thigh. Her hair would probably get stuck to her chapstick in the wind.

The moment she reaches the apartment building she pulls the mail out of their mailbox, sticks it in her pocket. She wipes a hand across the thin sheen of sweat that’s cropped up on her face, rolls her eyes when she sees her own reflection in the doors of the broken-down elevators. She has a wide smear of grease across her cheekbone, but she hopes that Trixie will pull her into the shower when she gets inside.

She climbs the stairs with the ice cream, reaches the door with her key already out and unlocks it. All of the lights are on but Trixie isn’t anywhere to be seen, although Katya can hear loud synth behind the closed door of their bedroom. 

“Trixie?” She pulls her boots off at the door, sticks a cigarette between her lips, walks to the bedroom door and pushes it open. Trixie is kneeling on the floor, turned away from her, locked in her own world. Katya lights her cigarette. “Trixie?”

Katya can hardly bring herself to say her name out loud. It comes out weak, crackling with her smoker’s voice and her dry throat, muffled behind the cigarette. But in her mind she can surely say it. The blood in her skull is pounding _Trixie Trixie Trixie Trixie_ on repeat, a fucked record that will taunt her until she screams it all out.

Trixie’s head shoots up from where she’s kneeling, her blonde curls bob at her shoulders where she’s cropped them. They continue to bounce even as Trixie’s entire body stills completely, the radio playing loud and tinny on the floor right by her knee.

She’s wearing her new jeans, the ones Katya had hastily stuffed money in her wallet to encourage her to buy them _now, baby_ in case of rationing. Smuggled jeans have never been worth the style, in Katya’s opinion. The denim is hard, bent at the knee. Katya knows the little red marks they give Trixie’s soft skin well. Her red button-up is stained with toothpaste down the front, Katya thinks that she might have worn it to bed the night before. The buttons stretch, give tiny previews of her bra.

And all of Katya’s money, stacks upon stacks upon stacks of banknotes and coins, is spread across the floor.

Trixie is in her white socks, and her cheeks are red with being bent over on the cold floor but also, probably, with Katya’s unexpected entrance. Katya can hardly comprehend the scene in front of her in the worst way- she doesn’t get where she is, the bedroom feels tilted as if through an earthquake, she feels like she’s completely wasted, wasted enough that the light of the lamp blurs. She takes a deep drag, closes her eyes, holds the smoke inside her lungs for as long as she can, until all of her insides begin to burn.

“Katya-” Trixie starts, bends at the knees to get up and bumps the radio. Katya watches it fall in slow motion, blowing a couple of neatly stacked banknotes from the tops of their piles as it falls over with a thump, antenna jiggling and music shuddering before stopping, thrusting the both of them into complete silence.

Katyas’s mouth is wide open and she still has both of the shopping bags in each hand, ice cream probably melting in the heat of the apartment. She can’t think straight, she can’t rationalize what’s happening in front of her and she wants to take a five minute breather, wants to sit and try to figure it out, her feet move before her head can pull her attention from the room and Trixie, who’s picked the radio back up and is trying to stand, reaching out for Katya’s shoulder.

She’s in the kitchen in a matter of seconds, opening the freezer and stuffing the full bags of ice cream inside, without bothering to take the containers out and stack them. An ice tray falls out right before she slams it shut, and she watches detachedly as Trixie’s hands pick it up off the floor, her anxious eyes and moving mouth. Katya can feel the air from her speech but she can’t hear it, can’t make out what she’s saying through the thumping between her ears.

Katya pulls herself away again, floats to the table and somehow sits, wraps her arms around herself, gripping at her thick sleeves. The ground is swirling, Katya wishes somewhere, tapping in the back of her head, that she could have the physical ability to pivot herself to grab the bottle of vodka sitting less than a foot away from her, but her fingers are barely hanging onto the fabric of her jumpsuit.

“Katya!” She finally can match a distorted mumble with a curve of Trixie’s pink, bitten lips. “Katya, oh my god.”

Katya blinks, lets herself resurface. Trixie is bent at the waist a little bit, to be able to keep her head at Katya’s eye level. One of her hands is wrapped around her own waist, as if she’s holding herself together. One of the buttons that was so precariously holding her breasts together has popped open, and she reaches to button it back up. Her chest is bright red, flushed and distressed skin.

Once Katya lifts her head up all the way, to properly focus her eyes and look at Trixie, Trixie’s mouth shuts. Her cheeks drain of color and she shrinks a little, her eyes dim, their angry sparkle disappears in the tiniest passage of time.

“What the hell were you thinking.”

It’s a statement. Katya isn’t leaving it open to be ignored, or debated, although with Trixie’s selfish tendencies she’s almost certain that she _will_ ignore it, that she’ll try to turn it all around on Katya, either by insisting her innocence or convincing Katya that she was doing it for the best. Katya knows better. She always has.

Trixie’s mouth opens, closes again. Her plump, pink lips warp in anxiety, she bites the inside of her cheek and swallows, the little lines of fat over her throat flex with the movement of her esophagus. The room is closing in fast, and Katya breathes deeply in an attempt to get the walls to cease their movements.

Trixie was digging around, counting her money, Katya hasn’t even touched it, hasn’t opened the box but for a half a centimeter every time, to slip in hefty portions of paychecks. Katya spoils Trixie with every dollar she doesn’t stuff in her savings, buys her anything she could ever want and more, sends her off to shop for whatever she could possibly be dreaming about, any kind of material item she could ever desire. Katya would give her the world, would give up any of her future health and happiness to ensure that Trixie would have both for the rest of her life, and Trixie stole her trust right from Katya’s open palms, out of everything Katya was willing to give her.

Trixie is still standing in front of her in silence. Katya stands to match her, once she’s breathed deeply enough times to be sure she won’t fall on shaky legs. She looks right down into Trixie’s eyes, her little gold earrings and her pale cheeks.

“I said, what the hell were you thinking.”

Katya can pinpoint the exact moment when the tears start blooming in Trixie’s eyes. Her cheeks are reddening again, up her cheekbones into her hairline and around and over her pale eyebrows. Katya has never seen such a proud, reckless woman look so ashamed. It sends a wicked thrill down her spine.

Katya crosses her arms, squishes her breasts behind them. Trixie watches her forearms, her eyes flick to where Katya’s hands are gripping her own biceps. Katya rolls her eyes.

“Don’t objectify me, baby. I’m asking you an important question.” Trixie swallows again. Katya would pay a lot of that useless cash to know exactly what she’s thinking. “I’m waiting.”

One tear drips down Trixie’s chubby cheek, glistening in the soft dust of white-blond hairs. Katya can’t stand the look of her, her seeming innocence and her lying mouth, her pride in her own beauty. Katya has never felt so ugly. 

“Come on.”

Trixie stays silent. Katya can’t stop the laugh from bubbling up inside her and it comes out of her mouth without her consent, a loud scoff right in Trixie’s sweet face, her breath blowing back the hair from around her temples. Trixie’s eyebrows furrow and her blush spreads down her neck in a second, she breathes in quickly.

“You can’t say that isn’t neurotic, Katya. It’s foolish! You’re a fucking coward, a coward for not counting your damn cash. You want to leave so bad, I watch you look out the window when you’re with me like I’m hardly there, because all you can think about is running away. How are you supposed to leave if you’re so afraid?”

Katya can hardly keep up with her accusations with enough time to breathe, she tries to expand her lungs and stomach to allow air inside but she can’t, it’s like her entire torso is bound tight with industrial tape, a perverted attempt by her animal instincts to hold herself together.

“I wanted to support you, Katya. I tried so hard, but you’re just an anxious little girl. Too childish to take control of your own life.” Trixie spits with her words, spraying Katya’s face with a misting rain. Katya’s shoulders are aching and she can feel her upper body bending down, like how Trixie slouches from the weight of her own breasts. Katya is winding downwards like a tree, and she lets her spine snap back into place as Trixie’s words register.

Trixie is panting, staring her down. She hasn’t flinched like she’s guilty, hasn’t shown even a singular flash of remorse for what she’s said. And Katya turns, spins on her heel and stalks over to the counter, where two new bottles of vodka are sitting, waiting for her to slam them down in utter desperation.

“Don’t fucking drink when I’m trying to talk to you!” Trixie yells, her voice breaking at the end of the phrase, and the snap as Katya untwists the cap echoes it perfectly. Katya turns to face her pale fingers shaking as she drinks a good third of it down. It feels so good, the unforgiving burn. Trixie’s eyelashes are fluttering and Katya despises how she can see them fluttering against the pillowcase, with Katya’s entire fist inside of her, fluttering in tandem with her aching insides and twitching stomach. 

“I’ll do what I damn please,” Katya coughs through her last gulp, as she sets the bottle back down on the counter. Some of the warm liquid splashes up her arm, and she realizes with a little bit of a start that she’s still in her work clothes, that she stinks to high heaven, that she can feel the dried sweat on her brow from the filthy winter air pinching her skin. She must look ridiculous, she runs her hand through her hair and pulls on it a little, fingers gripping the short strands in an attempt to blow off steam.

It’s disturbing, how quickly she’s gotten used to Trixie either dropping to her knees for her or pulling her to fuck her in the shower the moment she comes home filthy like this. It makes her shoulders ache when she considers how sexy Trixie thinks she is, how Trixie is staring at her body in the lumpy jumpsuit. 

The alcohol hits her harder than it has in a long time, and she feels seven years old again, drinking her way through her first bottle of vodka with her friends, skipping school to get wasted and stick lit cigarettes into the snow to watch it melt, turn to muck beneath their fingers. Somehow she’s thirty-one, in the kitchen of her own apartment, her girlfriend’s massive breasts heaving with hatred at her own justified anger. She feels more of a child than she did then, utterly clueless.

“You always do what you damn please.” Trixie’s voice is freezing, Siberian polar night, and her eyes seem to darken just as the navy sky. Katya grips the edge of the counter where she’s resting her hips, her body aching from crouching at the drill and then with all of the tension of the moment. Trixie is clenching her jaw, sucking in her cheeks, blinking again and again. It’s driving Katya insane, how she twitches with anger, she wants to scream at her to stand still.

“I do what I damn please?” Katya lifts the bottle again, pops three buttons open on her jumpsuit. Trixie finally flinches, then, because Katya is whispering as quietly as she can manage. She takes three swallows, eyes still open on Trixie’s face. She’s stopped crying, she seems too caught up in her attempts to tear Katya to shreds to do so. Katya is happier for it, would much rather have the both of them screaming at each other so that the entire floor could hear their business than have Trixie crying and whimpering, begging for forgiveness. Katya doesn’t want to give it. She doesn’t deserve it. “I do. What I damn. Please.”

Trixie nods, takes a deep, shuddering breath. Katya rolls her eyes and unzips her jumpsuit down her stomach, gets a whiff of her own body odor in her tank top. It fuels her anger, her own stench of work that she does half for Trixie, so that Trixie can laze around the apartment and work when she feels so inclined, so she can go out and shop while Katya falls asleep at 6pm in their bed, too exhausted to tag along and help Trixie carry her bags.

Trixie has eighty percent control over Katya’s checkbook. Katya cannot fathom, in her drunkenness, what more she could possibly want.

“I don’t ask you for a single thing,” Trixie mumbles. She reaches out a hand for the bottle, where Katya’s left it precariously at the edge of the countertop. Katya laughs, a loud, solid belly laugh, almost allows it to knock her over onto the floor. Her eyes are blurring with Trixie’s desperate statements, how stupid they sound, how angry Trixie is over her own silly mistake.

“Christ,” Katya gasps in mirth. Trixie’s hands are shaking so much that vodka is spilling down her front, dripping down her already stained red shirt. Katya bets that her breasts are damp with her own sweat and the droplets, and she wants to scream at her own mind for not allowing her the full hatred she so wishes she could unlock. She wants to hate Trixie more than anything, wants to have the wherewithal to shut her out, to take her money and run, to leave her behind as the country collapses.

Katya is too drunk to respond properly but she can’t stop laughing, and she can practically see the steam coming out of Trixie’s ears. Katya is so repulsed by all of it, she’s just another drunken factory worker coming home to scream at a woman, just a filthy, muscled lesbian desperate enough for a beautiful woman to love her that she threw away all of her plans, gave it all up for the best one she’s ever seen.

She’s fucking predictable, is what she is, she can’t keep Trixie happy and she can’t keep _herself_ happy, she can’t stick to her guns and she can’t stop letting Trixie get away with all of it. She’s failed again, like she knew she would, like she had predicted years and years ago when she had set her time limit at thirty-five. She might as well be there now, Trixie’s existence has literally set her back two full years.

“I _don’t_ ask you for anything, Katya! You give it to me! I haven’t asked you for a single thing and you know it.” Katya sighs, her breath is hot and she’s suddenly overtaken with the desperate need for a cigarette. She circles Trixie to grab a pack off the table, circles her wide so that she doesn’t touch her. 

She stuffs one between her first two fingers, lights it after three tries of burning her fingers, hissing at the pain she can hardly focus on. Trixie stares her down the entire time, waiting for her to open her mouth. Katya’s anger is steadily burning deep in her gut. The grease on her forearms itches her skin, and she sticks her cigarette between her lips to pull her jumpsuit off, lets it hang off of her at her slim waist. She hardly has any hips, and she can feel gravity pulling the heavy fabric down her thighs. All of the mail falls out of her pocket, slides across the floor. Neither of them move to pick it up. She kicks the pants off, walks back to the counter as she takes a deep drag, letting the smoke relax her.

She leans over the sink with her jaw propped on her elbow, and tries to ignore the hot tears that are building up in her eyes now that she’s sitting in a moment of relative silence. She smokes slowly, allows herself some deep breaths.

Trixie wants her to respond, but Katya is just so tired. Her stomach is swirling with rage, exhaustion, and vodka, the hairs on the back of her neck are standing straight up in agitation. She wants to sleep for three days, wants to sleep until the world resets itself and Trixie no longer despises her. 

“Yekaterina.” Trixie’s hand slams down on the end of the counter. Katya looks up groggily at the formality, from where her hand is inching to the bottle again. Her eyelids feel swollen. “I haven’t asked you for anything.”

Her sweet voice breaks, and Katya can hear how it’s been worn down from her yelling. It makes Katya’s stomach lurch, how she wants to make her tea, bring it to her in bed to soothe her throat, let her sweat all over the clean sheets as Katya rubs her legs down, kisses her ass, tickles the tops of her feet and eats her out sloppily, forbidding her to make a sound so that she can rest her voice.

Katya looks over to her again. She’s crying, _really_ crying, with bright red eyes and trembling eyebrows. 

“I know,” Katya whispers. The kitchen light casts dramatic shadows of everything around them, Katya wishes it was summertime so that she could go outside, sit in the grass and take in sun rays, allow her body to rest. It’s exhausting holding her muscles up- she has muscle to carry muscle, but none of them are able to ease her exhaustion, none are able to calm her brain. “I know you haven’t.”

She can admit that. It’s embarrassing, but she can admit it. And it feels like chipping away at her hard-won resolve, the staunch plans she’s had all her life. Her shoulders feel heavier, and she wonders if she looks like Trixie, curled up into herself in her tank top and underwear, bare feet freezing on the floor.

Trixie nods, covers her sobbing mouth with a red hand, inches to her armchair to pick the thick wool blanket up and wrap it around her shoulders.

Katya smashes the butt of her cigarette in the full ashtray on the countertop. Trixie is rocking up and down on the balls of her feet, blanket sticking to her hair as her trembling fingers light a cigarette in front of her, before putting it between her swollen lips. Her face is blotchy, she has a pimple that’s irritated right on her jawline.

“But that doesn’t mean that you can snoop in my shit.”

Trixie looks up from where her tired eyes are unfocused at the persian rug, and she looks irredeemably caught-in-the-act. Katya rolls her eyes, scoffs around a new, unlit cigarette. She takes her time to flick her lighter, to watch the flame catch on the paper. 

“Don’t act stupid. You know that.”

There are three lamps in the living room. Two of them were brought along by Trixie, her parents hardly noticing that she had snatched one from their own living room to brighten her girlfriend’s. They’re all on, Trixie uses all three whenever she’s home, insists that it’s healthy to be able to see. Katya can see just fine with a single lamp.

Katya feels bare, exposed with all of the lamps on. She’s exposed physically, her thighs are trembling a little with the chill and her underwear are thin from wear, Trixie can likely see everything beneath them. Her nipples are painfully hard, and her biceps feel weak with anxiety. Trixie watches her, taking distressed drags, shaky breaths pushing the smoke out of her nose. 

“You took advantage of my trust,” Katya breathes. Her cigarette has been put out from a violent huff from her nose, from the cold of the room. She squeaks bare toes on the hardwood to turn up the heat. It rushes on with a chug, and Trixie pulls the blanket tighter around herself.

She watches Trixie swallow- Katya’s eyes can’t move much, they’re too heavy to travel down Trixie’s body to see how her toes are turned in at a sharper angle than usual, how her knees keep shifting and bending. She simply watches Trixie’s face, the tears that are steadily tracking across her cheeks. She’s too beautiful to be trusted, maybe, Katya thinks in blinding anger. She should never have fucked Trixie that first night, should have driven her home and ignored her calls until she gave up.

“Are you sorry?” Katya can’t help asking. The words spew out of her mouth ungracefully- most things about her are ungraceful- the buzzed sides of her hair, her eyebags, the way her face wrinkles when she smiles- but sometimes she hates how she can’t speak like Trixie can, fast and angry. Her words ease out slower. She runs her dirty hand through her hair. Her fingers are drunker than her head feels.

Trixie breathes in, and Katya waits. 

“Katya-”

“I can’t believe you.” Trixie’s face reddens even further. Katya watches her as she falls into her designated armchair, pulling her knees up beneath her chin. She lets out another sob, one that sounds so pained and so inhuman that Katya’s throat closes up. “I never thought you would do that.” 

Trixie brings a hand to her face, but then it’s back at the blanket, pulling it off of herself, and she stands, swaying a little in drunkenness, eyes flashing.

“You never thought I would? Well if _I_ didn’t do it, who would have? Not you,” Her voice is raised again and her bloodshot eyes are squinting, little freckles twisting in the rolls of her tiny windswept wrinkles. “You wanna leave but you’re too much of a pussy to do it. You’re going to die here, in this apartment, at sixty, just wither away on a diet of smokes and vodka, and the worst part of all of it is that I don’t think I could leave you,” Trixie is crying again, holding her arms around her middle. Her voice is shaking with sobs and she looks like she could fall at any moment. “Don’t you know I worry about you? I love you.” Trixie covers her face again.

Katya is going to vomit, and she turns as fast as she possibly can to reach the trash beneath the sink behind her, releases the sandwich she ate for lunch and all of the vodka from the past hour or so into the can. Trixie is silent behind her, except for her tiny whimpers and gasping sobs. She doesn’t speak, and Katya heaves three more times, until she doesn’t have anything left inside of her. She runs the water, ducks her head to rinse her mouth, hands fumbling to turn off the tap.

She doesn’t realize that her ears are ringing until Trixie’s hand is hot on her shoulder, her palm burning into her skin. The room swirls in chunks, like it does when you’ve been too drunk too fast and can’t control your inevitable loss of consciousness. 

“I’m sorry,” Trixie whispers. Her mouth is right by Katya’s ear, her hands are tripled all over Katya’s body. She’s surprisingly strong, can pull Katya around just as much as Katya can manhandle her, and when she takes her tight into her arms Katya has to wrestle her to pull away.

Katya keeps her eyes squeezed shut. Trixie pushes her hair from her forehead, wipes her sweat with her soft palms, kisses her cheek. Katya’s body is still twitching, her heart is pounding so fast that she feels like her entire body is moving along with it, jittering. 

“Did you not know? Or you just don’t like it?” Trixie asks, says it gently into Katya’s face. Katya can feel the walls closing in, clamping around her. Trixie’s cool breath is keeping her afloat, simply for the physical relief from the painful, swirling heat the rest of her body is suctioned in.. Katya can’t stop herself from collapsing into her soft body, but she pulls herself out of her grip to sit on the kitchen floor, stuff her head between her knees. Trixie stays standing above her. “I love you.”

Katya wants to scream. Somewhere deep inside her there’s a sense of intense misunderstanding, turmoil that spreads through all of her veins outwards so that she sways back and forth on the tile floor, rocks on her heels. Trixie whimpers, Katya can see her feet turn inwards even more in her socks. She bets that Trixie is weighing her options, wondering if she should kneel beside Katya to comfort her or if she’s about to be shunted out of Katya’s life, out of the apartment that she’s said many a time is her first ever real home.

Katya can’t hold in the big sob that pulls her lips apart. They’re chapped and Katya can feel how they crack when they open, and Trixie loses her nerve, falls to the ground beside her and takes her face between her hands.

Katya shakes her head, swallows her sobs forcefully and takes a deep, trembling breath. She pulls Trixie’s hands away from her face by her soft wrists, sets her jaw and wipes her tears. Trixie’s mouth is hanging open, and Katya stands on weak legs.

“This is what I meant.”

Katya stares at her as she pulls herself to standing again with a pale hand on the counter. She looks Katya right in the eyes, accusing and fearless. Because she knows that Katya won’t ask her to leave. 

“This is what I meant- you’re too much of a pussy to do anything.” Trixie sighs, looks so disappointed that Katya can hardly stand herself. “You don’t give a shit that I’m in love with you. Well lemme tell you: you’re in love with me, too.” 

Katya ignores the freezing knife of pain that pushes into her stomach at the statement and turns, lets the hot rush in her stomach flow across her shoulders and high into her skull, swirling her vision. It’s relieving, having something to focus on despite how she’s been thrown off her game.

“What the fuck did you just call me.”

Trixie rolls her eyes, crosses her arms again. Her breasts strain against her top and Katya grips the sides of the counter as tightly as she can to try to expel some of the pain that keeps moving in waves across her entire body. 

“Who cares what I called you, you need to do some deep reflecting, Katya! You need to really look inside yourself and think if this is a healthy way to live. I’d do anything for you. I try so hard to make you happy, to cheer you up, all of this fucking, fucking, _emotional labor_ , and you keep acting like this stoic, impenetrable _asshole_. How can you have been with me for two years and not love me. I know you love me,” Trixie ends on a loud sob. 

Katya can feel all of it winding her tighter and tighter as Trixie delivers her little speech. They’re both drunk. She wants to scream, wants to spit blood on the floor and bang her fists on the table, wants to punch through all the windows and sleep in the freezing night out of her own stubbornness. She wants Trixie to feel terrible for all that she’s said, wants her to worry about Katya some more, if she’s really so concerned about her health and happiness.

“You won’t even respond to me,” Trixie whispers, hiccups and covers her mouth. Her hands are fluttering with anxiety and her eyes squeeze closed, Katya’s fingers ache against the countertop.

“How dare you,” Katya breathes. It’s hard behind her clenched teeth, her skull is pounding even harder from the bones rubbing together. Her mouth is dry and tastes of vomit, she’s in deep physical discomfort, all across her body, but she isn’t cold anymore. Her skin is burning hot. “I’ve allowed you to walk all over me for two years, I’ve. I’ve let you live with me when nobody loved you at home and I’ve fucked you better than anybody ever has, I’ve never done you any wrongs. I’ve taken care of you, I’ve fucking _babied_ you to the ends of the Earth and I’ve allowed you in my home, fucking everything up and decorating with your fucking _trinkets_ , you’re so pretty that you don’t even think about anyone else’s feelings- what if I never _wanted_ you here? Have you ever thought about that?

“I’m not here to be accountable for you. You could take some responsibility for the privacy of mine that you’ve invaded, or the way you’ve uprooted me, or how you never asked if it was okay for you to do any of it. You coerced me to stay here in this hellhole, _for you_ , and this is how you repay me? By digging through all of my private belongings- maybe money is a laughing matter where you’re from, but it sure as hell isn’t one where I’m from.” Katya is panting, her hands have moved to cross in front of her breasts. Her entire body is heaving with anxiety, her eyes are dry enough for her to try to rub them to encourage them to water. It doesn’t work, and she has to blink to focus on Trixie’s ruddy face again. 

Trixie is standing like she has nothing left to say. One of the corners of her mouth is pulling down into a frown and her arms are still wrapped around herself. Katya sighs, covers her face with both hands and blows hot air into her palms, lets the space fog up in damp heat, cool off against her nose. Trixie whimpers, detached from any crying or speech. Katya groans into the now dry, calloused space. 

Katya’s words are ringing in the air. They sounded empty, loaded with ageless frustrations that somehow lost all of their importance in the time from discovering Trixie in the bedroom to now, both of them standing in the kitchen, not knowing what to say. Katya can’t imagine how Trixie could reply. She knows, dramatically enough, that making both of them purposefully aware of all of the issues Katya has with Trixie might crack the foundation, make the concrete they’ve poured down and hastily leveled irreparably unstable. Katya wouldn’t blame her for never speaking to her again.

Trixie sniffs, sighs, Katya doesn’t lift her face from the warm space of her hands. 

A tiny sob floats between them: Katya can’t tell if it came from behind her closed lips, stuck together with dried spit and sticky skin or from Trixie’s hanging-open mouth. But it makes something inside her crumple, newspaper drenched in spilled coffee, little grounds flecking the table around it. She feels like the imprints of lead cyrillic faintly affecting the surface of the table as they’ve been rubbed off the thin pages by an elbow.

She allows her head to come out of her hands, her eyes blurred in their cruel divorce from the warm darkness. Trixie is still standing in front of her, her shoulders vibrating with shivers. Katya can hear her teeth chattering. 

“I’m going to bed,” Katya spits. She takes a moment to cough up whatever’s stuck deep in her throat, spit it uncaringly into the sink. She can feel Trixie’s wince behind her, knows intimately how her thighs would shift and clench at the blatant filthiness of Katya after a long shift on a good day, but how much she must hate it tonight. Katya can feel her mostly-dissipated anger flare up, a tiny thrill of pleasure at being disgusting, at putting Trixie off.

Sometimes she’s sure that Trixie’s idea of her is fogged up, romanticized and fetishized. Sometimes she’s so certain, but Trixie’s face hasn’t changed when she turns back around. She’s never grimaced at Katya, she’s never othered her or belittled her. It makes Katya feel guilty in a heavy way that she doesn’t want to confront. For all of Katya’s masculinity, Trixie has femininity abound to push her around with, endless _love_ for all of Katya’s masculine traits and mannerisms. It feels so much bigger than her, like something she can’t place in the world around them. It feels momentous, when they’re fucking and Trixie wants her entire body to be covered by Katya’s, fucked by Katya, touched everywhere, as deep inside as Katya can go, how excited she is to put her lips and fingers on Katya, too.

And somehow all of it has led up to this moment, and Katya’s been fucked over, had her precious, private trust pulled out of her stomach and stomped on.

Katya takes care to not look at Trixie on her way to the bedroom. She shuts the door but leaves it unlocked, the lock is too temperamental to risk getting stuck. And she wants Trixie to be able to come in, maybe, after she’s asleep, so she can brush her teeth and pee, wash her face free of tears before she drifts off into restless dreams on her favorite, new couch. 

Katya strips out of her briefs and tank top, pulling them from her burning skin as if they were the culprit for her discomfort. She turns the shower to the hottest it will go this far into the winter, and the temperature leaves enough to be desired that it sends another, fresh thrill of anger up her spine. She lets her face rinse of grease under the weak stream, lets the pounding water loosen her tensed muscles and her aching skull, scrubs the stench of the factory and vomit from her limbs.

When she finishes cleaning herself as much as she can stand, she steps from the shower to towel off. She stares herself down in the mirror as she’s done many times before. Her tiny breasts, broad shoulders, flat stomach and defined muscles put forth such an image- one that the public would hardly ignore even if she had long, flowing hair. It’s exhausting sometimes, fielding stares and spit and moments of complete disregard. But the idea of changing is even more exhausting, and she’s certain it’s a part of why she’d latched on to Trixie so quickly. She doesn’t want to think about it.

The sides of her head that Trixie buzzes short regularly feel familiar and soft beneath her fingers, her blue eyes judge her without mercy in her foggy, stained reflection. Living inside of Katya’s body feels exhausting most of the time, both physically and in an ache that seems to exist behind her, underneath her breasts and past her skull, behind her head. Sometimes if she lies on the bed and stares up at the ceiling, one hand on her rising and falling stomach, she feels inexplicably exhausted, as if her bones are lazily floating inside of her useless flesh, waiting to finally decompose the night she blissfully sleeps into death.

She huffs, blinks to pull herself out of it, carries herself into the dark bedroom. She slips on a sweater in the cool, empty air, kicks at the cash on the floor with a bare, damp foot until all of it is sitting in a little mound, next to the chair covered in both of their clothes, where she can’t see it as she drifts off. She’ll clean it up in the morning, and she’ll count it properly while she’s at it. There’s no reason to put it off, now.

She sighs, sits on the edge of the bed to pull on a clean pair of underwear and rub her hands over her face again. Forehead to chin, palm warm against her neck. Her mind is blank, she can’t think of anything but the feel of the itchy wool against her bare breasts and the heavy blankets beneath her thighs. She rubs her hands up and down the tops of her thighs, squeezing them to attempt for some blood flow, yanks on some of the blonde hairs there just to pinch herself.

A third of a bottle of vodka is sitting neglected next to the side table, and her back cracks as she bends down to reach it. She unscrews it with numb fingers, lets the familiar liquid singe her aching throat, torn apart by the same drink just an hour earlier. She’s long ago developed the ability to vomit many times through a long night of drinking and start back up like nothing’s gone wrong. It serves her well, well enough to pull feeling back into her stomach and toes, fingers and elbows.

Eventually she’s conjured up enough physical feeling to be able to embrace her mental exhaustion. She leans back against the pillow, pulls the blanket all the way up to her nose and squeezes her eyes shut. Something creaks in the living room. She’s asleep before she can register it.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trixie has set out a cup of coffee for her, too, and she points to the screen when Katya keeps watching her.
> 
> Katya’s eyes and ears focus on the news, and she blinks repeatedly as she takes all of it in.
> 
> “You said it would happen,” Trixie whispers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome back :) to a Short update in anticipation of a long final chapter ahead! I am very sorry for the lack of replies to comments on the last chapter. I love all of you so much and was very much inspired and deeply touched by all of your emotional reactions :))). Replies are coming soon, because I can't not- life has been a rollercoaster for me the past few weeks and I’m happy to be back and very ready to give this chapter to all of you, and to chat with all of you about the last one.
> 
> Special thanks goes out to 13 Beaches by Lana Del Rey (who would have thought), restraint, and my friends :))
> 
> This chapter takes place on Dec. 25, 1991. The Next Day!

“Katya.”

Trixie is speaking omnisciently in her dream. It’s foggy, and Katya is out in the field in clunky puddle boots, trying to pick wildflowers in the mud and grit, the muck that doesn’t allow for anything to grow but brown dead grass. 

“Katya, come see.”

The sky is closing in and Katya needs the flowers, she has a handful of little purple ones that are wilting faster than she can pick them, her fingers are covered in drying dirt and she can’t see for the fog that’s growing thicker and thicker. She doesn’t know where the snow has gone. Trixie’s voice is loud, singsong, but Katya can’t see her, either, can’t see the apartment in the gray distance any longer. She’s lost, and she faintly wonders if she’ll need to sleep, drown in the mud until the fog dissipates.

And then her eyes are wrenched open with Trixie’s hand squeezing her shoulder.

She’s looking down at her and she’s pale, anxious to wake Katya but Katya rationalizes it, half-asleep, as her being late for work. But then she remembers that it’s a Saturday and Trixie is home and she doesn’t need to be anywhere, and then her brain ticks over to what happened the day before.

“Katya, come see this,” Trixie whispers, and then she’s gone. Katya is still drunk, she stretches her legs out and lets herself wallow in how her body won’t move the way she wants it to. It hasn’t in years. She’s aged quicker than she ever thought was possible.

She allows herself think for three full seconds about the night before. She doesn’t look at the ground, at the pile of cash in the corner.

Trixie is in the living room, and Katya has the upper hand: to forgive or to hold on to her anger, crumple it tight in her chest until Trixie’s face grows stale in her mind. She doesn’t know if she wants to go and sit with her, but then the TV volume is being turned up and there’s a yell down the hall, and Katya sits up with the disruption.

The building is usually almost deathly silent. So she pulls the blanket around her naked shoulders, climbs out of her cocoon and pads into the living room where Trixie is curled in on herself around a cup of coffee, eyes leaving the bright screen in the dark winter morning to watch Katya cross the red rug to where her armchair is sitting empty. 

Trixie has set out a cup of coffee for her, too, and she points to the screen when Katya keeps watching her.

Katya’s eyes and ears focus on the news, and she blinks repeatedly as she takes all of it in.

“You said it would happen,” Trixie whispers. 

Gorbachev’s sweat is dripping and he’s looking older than Katya’s ever seen him. And as he speaks she can feel something bubbling up, something that makes her want to cry and drop to her knees, beg Trixie for forgiveness, kiss her cheeks and marry her, twist her hair up high and pin it there, zip her into a big dress.

She can feel Trixie’s eyes on her. And she watches the entire speech knowing that Trixie is watching her, waiting for her to speak. Katya can feel her anxiety, about the Union and about Katya, if she’ll forgive her. 

It’s over, all of it, the Union and Gorbachev and their fight seems so small now, so insignificant, once Katya’s biggest fear is squashed in the matter of a single action. And hardly a single action: months and months of conflict, of protests Katya hasn’t bothered with, of endings and embarrassments and Trixie’s loud squeals at the TV. But it seems so small, for Gorbachev to announce that he’s _discontinuing his activities_ as President, all of it is done, exhausted, in a bland office. It seems clinical, unforgiving, and so overwhelming, but also somehow the only thing Katya has ever wanted to hear. 

And so disturbingly timed.

“Merry Christmas, baby,” Katya whispers at the end, when the screen is cut off and the news comes back on, detailing the implications of the end of it all in rapid speech that Katya doesn’t care to follow. She knows what it means, and she knows that Trixie knows it, too. Trixie sniffs at her words and Katya sips her coffee until the cup is half empty.

Trixie clears her throat and Katya finally turns to look at her. She’s been crying, there are tears falling quickly down her cheeks and her eyes are puffy and red, in the way that only beautiful women cry. She’s dainty and delicate, taller and bigger than Kaya but much more gentle. It’s agonizing, and watching her cry is even more so.

She clears her throat again, doesn’t even bother to wipe her tears. They’re sliding leftover mascara down her cheeks.

“Katya, I am so sorry,” she whimpers. “Take me with you.”

Katya can’t swallow, she can’t breathe-- Trixie’s body is curling in on itself painfully, Katya’s biceps are numb and throbbing. She stretches her arms forward, cracks her back five times in succession, stands and sits herself with her thigh pressing against Trixie’s. She pulls her face, palm on her sticky cheek, to her chest, lets her cry and cry, lets Trixie’s tears wet her shirt and cool the fabric. Trixie takes her hand, Katya allows her to stick her fingers between her own, to curl her fingertips inward between the tendons of the back of Katya’s palm.

Trixie climbs up somewhere between sobs, sits on Katya’s thigh. Katya has never felt less of a desire to open her mouth, her mind is completely empty with relief, and with a kind of numb nihilism that she’s felt creeping on the horizon for a while, now. Trixie melts atop her, slides into a huffy sleep, and Katya stretches her body out across the couch, holds her as she rests, wraps both of them in a blanket.

It’s past noon when Katya wakes up. The sky hasn’t gotten any lighter, she can hardly see the hands of the clock stretched to the three in the dimness. Trixie is gone but the blanket is still warm, the cushion next to Katya is radiating her heat. Katya takes a moment to wrap the blanket tighter around her shoulders and then pulls it off, sits up to look around the deserted apartment.

She can hear them through the walls, Trixie, Sasha, and Shea. Katya can hear their drunkenness, can hear their glasses clinking over and over. It’s comforting, the muffled sounds, it’s nothing Katya has ever heard before. The building is usually silent, and the most she hears is the sounds of her own apartment around her. The sound of Trixie making coffee, the sound of Trixie humming to the radio.

Katya finds herself in the bathroom, staring herself down in the mirror. They’re probably stealing glances at the door, waiting for her to join them, but they can wait a few minutes longer. Katya can’t stop looking at the hungover blue bruises beneath her eyes, the eye bags she’s developed in the past couple of months. She runs a hand through her spiky hair, tangled and sticking upwards with sleep, tries to tame it to something presentable.

Trixie is probably on the edge of her seat and trying not to give it away. She’s probably squirming in fear of the talk that they’re bound to have once they’re back home, together in the apartment for the first time since the morning. Katya doesn’t know how she’s going to stomach it, it’s going to take mental heaving and pulling, a lifting of a great weight that she doesn’t think she can handle. 

The music is being cranked up next door, Katya can imagine Trixie dancing along. She imagines that Trixie is drunk, drunk to forget about Katya’s anger, drunk to stave off her anxiety about the future, drunk to keep up an appearance Katya can’t help but put forth constantly, no matter how much liquor she sloshes down her throat. 

Katya pulls on one of Trixie’s more festive sweaters, a pair of her own cheap jeans. She doesn’t bother with anything else but underwear, lets the wool scratch her bare skin painfully. It’s a cliché, an embarrassing thought, but she revels in being able to feel something. She stuffs her key in her pocket and locks the door behind her, knocks on the next one with the little bundle of wheat hanging decoratively from the peephole. The hallway is creaking with other parties all around her. It’s completely dissociated from reality, and it skews Katya’s perception of the event even further.

“Katya!” Sasha swings the door open for her and immediately takes her tight in her arms. Katya hugs her back, can’t help but smile at what Sasha understands to be Katya’s free ride out, all of her very dreams come true. “Oh, Katya.”

She keeps her hold on her as she shuts the door, Katya’s face stuffed into her sweater, eyes squeezed shut. She holds Sasha for as long as she’s allowed, feeling Trixie’s presence in the room beyond her linked hands on Sasha’s back. It’s like the air is buzzing, it’s an uncomfortable acknowledgement that her entire body makes of Trixie’s proximity.

Sasha pulls back from her first, and Katya can’t rationalize keeping a hold on her. Her eyes are shining in joy, and she kisses Katya’s cheek. Her lips are silky with red lipstick, the kind that Trixie never wears. It sticks to Katya’s skin, the fine lines across her cheek, and she doesn’t bother to rub it off.

She’s way too aware of all of her own movements. She’s overthinking every turn of her head, wondering if it seems too pained. She bets that she looks ill, that her face has lost it’s usual pallor to a gray when she finally has to look Trixie in the eyes, see how her eyebrows furrow. 

“Can I get a drink,” Katya says. It isn’t a question, and Trixie is pouring her a glass of wine before anyone else can move a muscle. Katya crosses to the couch, sits down with legs spread wide, props her elbow on her thigh to take the glass out of Trixie’s steady hand. They lock eyes across the rim of it, and Katya curses the dramatic quality of the scene. 

“Thank you,” she whispers. She tries to push as much of her own ambiguous feelings into her voice as she can. Trixie nods, and Katya can tell that she’s already wasted, maybe too wasted to recognize what Katya wants to say. Katya doesn’t know what she wants, either. Katya doesn’t have a shred of an idea what to say to her, and Trixie will grasp that, soon enough. Katya hates it.

“You’re welcome, Katya.” Katya holds in a long groan. The other two are drunk enough to unknowingly be giving Trixie and Katya the moment of awkward, lonely eye contact. Shea is screeching in joy, holding Sasha around the waist and twirling her in circles. They’ve redecorated the apartment since Katya has last been, they’ve hung shawls and tapestries from every wall, there’s a mass of candles burning on the table. Katya lights a cigarette with one of them. Someone has been grinding weed on an ancient chemistry book. 

They sit, their eyes disconnect and wander to the dancing pair. Katya downs her wine at a comical speed, holds her glass across to Trixie again once it’s empty, and she fills it up without looking at her. She smokes three cigarettes as fast as she can, until the space between her ears is whirling a little more, and she’s finally comfortable enough to slow her breathing.

Shea slips out of Sasha’s arms and puts on a jazz record. It’s scratched enough to cause Katya’s head to pound along with the wine, and she drinks glass after glass until her vision is blurring and she’s standing, stretching up to the ceiling, pressing her fingers into the paint. Shea cheers, grips her hips in her faded jeans, and Katya laughs loudly at how it tickles, bends downward and takes Shea’s warm hands in her own, twirls her under her arm, cackles at how she stumbles. It’s like a switch has been flipped, and Katya allows it gratefully. 

She knows that it’s because she’s drunk, but she suddenly feels so inexplicably _happy_ , like so much has been lugged off of her shoulders. Her body doesn’t ache nearly as much as it usually does, she keeps twisting her hair between her fingers and she’s sure that it’s sticking straight up, the way Trixie likes to run her hands through to make it flat, then run them back to push it up, and so forth. 

Katya wants Trixie on her _lap_ , wants to grab her and kiss her hard and long, wants to take her driving into the cold night, drive for hours and hours until she can’t drive anymore, into the middle of nowhere, more nowhere than where they’re all living right now, and fuck her hard in the backseat until she squirts across Katya’s legs and hands. 

Katya loses focus for an unknown amount of time imagining it, and when she comes back to reality she’s sitting in an armchair, her fingernails are digging into her jeans, her right thigh is jiggling at a speed that has Trixie eyeing it in annoyance. Katya almost laughs, but swallows it down, loses the urge with another flash of imagining Trixie’s breasts bouncing beneath the sweater she’s wearing right now.

The snow has reached a whiteout, and Katya has steadily ignored Trixie, through slices of bread and bottles of wine and shots of vodka in glasses Sasha has hand-painted. The curtains are open to the silent storm, and all of the lights are on, Katya has somehow acquired a thick blanket around her shoulders. She feels warm from the inside out, except for the cold spot that Trixie on the couch is making, against the skin of her face. Katya stands again, sways a little with her feet planted firmly on the floor, hips sticking out in front of her.

Trixie has Sasha in her lap, is tickling her cheeks and kissing them after pinching them repeatedly. She’s holding her like a baby, keeps playing with her dangling earrings drunkenly. Sasha is humoring her, Katya can tell from glances she’s given Katya as she circles the room that she knows something is wrong. Shea doesn’t catch on it, though, so Katya wraps a hand around her thin wrist, dances obnoxiously along to the records she’s put on. The music is getting louder, and Trixie is yelling her slurred words in a continuingly higher pitch, the way she gets when she increases her femininity at an exponential rate when she wants Katya to fuck her. But this time, she just wants Katya to _look_ at her, and Katya can’t do it.

Trixie is radiating energy like Katya’s never felt come off of her before, more than the energy she radiates naked, rubbing off on the chair waiting for Katya to come home. She’s fully clothed, keeping Sasha in her lap, squeezing her tight, but all of her energy is focusing on her secret attempt to gain Katya’s attention. Katya can feel heat spread from her cheeks to her ankles, can sense Trixie’s every movement. Every word she says comes in and out of her ears, ringing in Katya’s skull. She wants Katya’s eyes on her, wants Katya to touch her or grip her hair and whisper for her to quiet down, but Katya can’t even look at her.

It’s too much, her body stretched out across the couch desperately, her behavior growing increasingly obnoxious for Katya’s annoyance. It’s making Katya dizzy, and she starts to wish the end of the night sooner. 

“We have cake!” Sasha exclaims suddenly, crawling out of Trixie’s lap and pulling on Katya’s back pockets to right herself. She leans to the side and shoots out an arm to take Shea’s shoulder, pulls her to the kitchen after her before Katya can say a word. The door swings shut behind them.

“Katya, Katya, come here.” Trixie is so, so drunk, and Katya cannot say no to her. She sits next to her, on the warm spot on the couch that Sasha’s feet were resting on earlier. And then Trixie is kissing her messily, first on her chin in a clear accidental misjudgement and then on the lips, her tongue pressing against Katya’s two front teeth. Katya pulls away from her, pushes her forehead back, but lets her head fall, so that the bridge of her nose rests against her collarbone through her sweater.

“Can I light you a cigarette?” Trixie asks. Katya nods into her breasts, hums in acceptance. She can hear the flick of the lighter Trixie had rummaged around the table for, and she raises her head. Trixie has the cigarette in her mouth, and she sucks in before Katya can pull it gently from between her lips.

Katya doesn’t try to penetrate the silence that follows. She sits with her knees in the hollow of Trixie’s crossed legs, her elbow propped on the back of the couch. Trixie watches her smoke, arms crossed over her breasts.

The two in the kitchen go through periods of making noise and then not, and Katya doesn’t doubt that they’re fucking, that their clothes are half off and their arms are tangled and their minds are worry-free, that their bodies are energetic and happy. 

“I don’t want to get into this here,” Katya says. Trixie’s eyes widen where they’ve drooped a little watching Katya’s throat flex, and she nods slowly.

“I agree with you,” she replies. Katya nods, squashes the butt in the ashtray on the coffee table.

“So kiss me, okay,” Katya says. Her words are muffled by Trixie’s lips on hers, a kiss that comes up quickly from below and is blatantly celebratory, loving, selfless, and excited. Katya doesn’t know how she does it while drunk, but she’s sure that she’s giving off the same feelings with her lips, too, kissing Trixie’s mouth that she knows well enough for the kiss to be familiar and comforting, in the way that their skin comes together.

Katya kisses her until she can feel all of the wine seeping from her tongue to Katya’s spit, swirling between their lips and getting swallowed. She kisses Trixie quiet, spends what is surely a full minute with their lips stationary, open, but completely still, against each other. Katya guides her, lips locked, so that their heads are resting against the back of the couch. Katya strokes her face with her cold hand, presses her fingers against her ears to muffle sound, pulls them back off, over and over again so that Trixie whimpers.

They kiss and kiss, until Katya can’t feel it anymore and starts to scrape her teeth against Trixie’s lips, since she’s sure that they’ve fallen numb like hers have. She can hear, as if she’s underwater, Sasha and Shea returning, talking loudly and setting the plate with the cake down on the books on the table. She can make sense of them lighting candles on it, and then the TV is being turned up to a volume that neither Katya nor Trixie can ignore.

Trixie hums, digs her thumbs hard into Katya’s cheeks and pulls away. Their lips are connected by two lines of spit, and Katya is so drunk that she reaches up with a pointer finger and breaks them apart, before Trixie can pull her bottom lip in from her natural pout. Katya brings her damp finger to Trixie’s lips, taps it against them as they close. As they break their charged eye contact the voices from the TV are made clearer. Sasha has turned one of the lamps off, presumably for the atmosphere.

The Kremlin is wavering on the poor signal, the screen is barred across with static, but Katya can see the flag being lowered, the tricolor raised. She’s still curled in Trixie’s lap, and Shea is yelling nonsense in her ear. 

“Katya, here,” Sasha pushes a plate with a slice of cake on it into her hand, and Katya passes it on to Trixie without a thought. Sasha hands her another for herself, and Katya stuffs the chocolate in her mouth, thoroughly enjoying the taste in a way that she realizes she hasn’t enjoyed food in years.

Trixie wipes sugary frosting off of the corner of Katya’s mouth with her dry thumb, stuffs it past Katya’s lips so that she can lick it off. Katya sucks her thumb down, all the way to her knuckle, wraps her lips around it and runs her tongue across her palm. Trixie laughs out loud, allows Katya to keep her finger in her mouth, and rests her forehead against her shoulder. Katya wonders if her sweater will leave a delicate red pattern in her skin.

They don’t bring it up, Shea and Sasha. They stay quiet on every subject but the political issue at hand, blatantly ignore how Trixie and Katya ignored each other for the beginning of the little party, and how they seem to refuse to speak to each other for the rest of it, but make out and suck on fingers seemingly in replacement. Katya is grateful for the allowance. She feels strangely vulnerable in ways she never has before, and she’s sure that it’s because of the new reality, the reality that Shea has viciously protested for in St. Petersburg, the new reality that Katya knows means she will be able to _leave_ , to _emigrate_ , not run away.

The night ends with Sasha snoring on an armchair and Shea whispering to her drunkenly, covering her in blankets and kissing her unconscious cheeks. Trixie sneaks a look at Katya, who’s curled with her feet beneath the couch cushion, and Katya nods, signaling that they should leave. Trixie holds up a finger before Katya can go too far, though, and fills their glasses to their brims with red wine, hands Katya her glass, and nods. Katya swallows down her laugh and sneaks out of the door, Trixie on her heels.

Their apartment seems more still than ever with the creaks of movement in the apartments around them. Trixie has downed half her glass in the trek down the hall, and she sets it on the table, holds her arms open wide. Katya shakes her head, smiles despite herself, and sets her own glass beside it. She accepts Trixie’s hug with less hesitation than she had expected herself to ever have, at any point in the future, not eight hours ago. 

Trixie’s body encloses Katya’s completely. She smells distinctly of wine, but beneath that is chocolate, and the neighboring apartment. 

“Come help me count,” Katya slurs. Trixie’s hand tightens around her bicep. She makes a little huff of concern, pulls back and gazes at her searchingly. Katya is tired of hiding all of it, keeps her face as drunkenly open as possible. “Please.”

Trixie gives her a tiny smile, like she’s sure that Katya will change her mind and yell at any moment, but Katya kisses her quickly, takes her hand, pulls her along to the bedroom. 

They sit on the hardwood with their glasses of wine that Trixie wrestles out of Katya’s grip to turn around, grab from the front room just after they’ve made it through the bedroom door. They sit cross-legged, Trixie’s socked foot reaching out and resting against Katya’s knee, in near silence as Katya makes pencil tallies in a beat-up notebook, as she piles coins and paper clips bills into more logical sections.

There’s so much, more than Katya had dared to hope for. Trixie’s breath gets shorter as the numbers get higher, and Katya realizes that she must not have gotten very far herself, in the first place. It makes it all the more profound, knowing that she’s counting to the very end of everything that she’s saved for the good majority of her life for the very first time.

And Trixie being the first person to touch it doesn’t bother her much, anymore. _Who else?_ Her brain supplies dramatically, but she agrees. Who else, to convince her of the moral right? Who else, to call her out? Who else, to tell her her every flaw, to promise her love to make up for them and understand them?

She feels guilty, but it’s numbed. Most of all, she feels relieved, lucky, humble. Trixie is still here, and Katya has to make it up to her. Trixie’s given her the world, and Katya has the financial means to give it right back. She’s growing her emotional means, planting seeds to ensure that they blossom and are fruitful, that she can hold Trixie when she cries and tell her how much she loves her every single day.

“Fuck,” Trixie sighs, once they’ve reached the end. Katya nods, holds out a numb hand. Trixie laces their fingers together and Katya rubs across each and every one of her soft knuckles, staring at lines of notebook paper.

-

“You know that I’ve always planned to come with you,” Trixie breathes. Katya sighs deeply, pulls her in by her squishy hips. From where her head is resting on the pillow it seems as if someone has pasted a piece of blue paper with yellow moon and stars drawn on right up to the glass of the window. Shea is blasting opera in the bedroom next door.

“I don’t know, actually. I didn’t know,” Katya whispers. The aria is slow, sugar being spooned into pitch black coffee and swirled to evaporate. Finally, the snow falling outside isn’t being blown viciously with the wind. It’s simply falling gently, slowly. The flakes are massive and lazy, and Katya is drunk. “I never knew.”

Trixie sighs out of her nose. It warms Katya’s bare breast, her inner arm. 

“You can’t believe that I was going to let you go all by yourself,” Trixie says. Katya’s heart aches, like it absolutely never has before. It aches over her entire body in waves, it feels like her legs are being prickled by tiny snowflakes, melting instantly on her overheated skin. She sits up abruptly, grips Trixie’s arms in her hands. Her eyes widen with surprise, a navy color in the darkness of the bedroom. She’s sobered up, and she’s all the more aware of her drunken thoughts, on the floor not an hour ago.

“I love you.” 

She knows that her face is contorted in a rush of feeling, she can feel her eyebrows twisted and her fingers digging into Trixie’s skin. Trixie is half on top of her, their legs are tangled and the skin of Katya’s right thigh is being pinched. She’s panting, despite having negative exercise for the entire day, and her stomach is spinning with wine and cake. Trixie is silent, watching her with an open face. 

“God, christ. I. Trixie,” Katya begs. She doesn’t know what she’s begging for, but she does it, until Trixie wrenches an arm from her grip and places her palm against her face. Her hand is a little sweaty. “I love you.”

Katya’s stomach is being wrenched into knots. She feels like she’s forcing herself to vomit out her insides, every single part of herself that’s been forced down the past two years. She’s stupid, and Trixie’s hand is soft against her hard cheek, Trixie’s hands on her body are so forgiving of all of her aching bones.

“God, I’m too old for you,” Katya whispers, her voice breaking in the middle, so that the end of it is breathed into Trixie’s face. The tears that are building up in Trixie’s eyes drop, two at the same time, symmetrical down her cheeks. Katya brings her thumbs up to touch them. 

“Six years is nothing,” Trixie says. Katya shakes her head. She’s all too aware of her own dramatics, but confessing her love to Trixie has opened her mouth for so much, and she suddenly wants to spew all of her insecurities out into Trixie’s open lips, wants to tell her everything and more, wants to tell Trixie the things that she doesn’t even know about herself. She wants to embarrass herself, wants to scrape her insides out for Trixie to examine.

“I’m so much older, just, just because I’m pathetic. I’m pathetic, Trixie, I’ve done nothing and I’ve never been of any fucking use, I sit in bed and go to work, play with the TV and fix the car and for what? The car is broken, I can’t have a normal fucking relationship with you, I can’t tell you that I love you for two years…” Katya trails off, and she’s uncomfortable with how Trixie’s hand prevents her head from falling down, prevents her eyes from focusing on something other than her own calloused hands on Trixie’s face. She drops them to her shoulders, squeezes and tries to gain something from the warmth radiating off of them.

“You aren’t pathetic. You love me so good,” Trixie says. She isn’t whispering. Katya knows that she isn’t drunk anymore, and she forces herself to listen. “Stop being so dramatic.”

Katya laughs but it’s strained, physically by her tight throat. Trixie giggles and her fingers poke Katya’s cheekbone, tap against the thin skin that stretches across her bone, right where her crow’s feet pattern down.

“You love me so well,” Trixie says. Katya closes her eyes, can’t stand Trixie looking right into them anymore, and Trixie kisses her once on the nose. 

“I’m sorry.” Katya takes a deep breath, straightens her back, opens her eyes. Trixie shifts with her, so that their bodies mirror and their knees touch.

“Well I accept your apology. We need to work on it, you know. Work on all of this,” Trixie says. It rests in the space between them. Katya understands her perfectly, where she might have pretended or told herself she didn’t any day before today.

“I am. I am so sorry,” Katya breathes. Trixie kisses her slowly, holds both of her hands and guides her to lie beside her, so that they are facing each other in bed. Katya’s elbow is uncomfortably digging into the mattress, but she can see far into Trixie’s face, so she allows it. “And, I love you for being with me. I’m working on it, I need to work for you. Because I’ve fucked up, more than I ever thought that I had, but. You are a woman that I want with me forever. I want you in America with me, and I love you more than anything. Trixie,” Katya forces herself to take a breath, and then finds that she’s finished. Trixie is looking at her like she understands, like she wants Katya to repeat herself. 

“I love you.” Trixie kisses her again. Katya takes a deep, shuddering breath and pulls her so that her head is resting on her chest, and she strokes her hair silently until she falls asleep, and then Katya listens to her snoring as she drifts off through an upset stomach from the wine and cake, along with added nerves and excitement that she hasn’t felt since her birthday was an exciting holiday, since she was getting good grades in school.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On a steaming hot day near Sacramento, five miles past the city and into the suburban wasteland that so often reminds Katya of where she came from, the thrifted armchair Katya has claimed as her own creaks in the silence of the near-empty living room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter isn't perfect (and i don't know if it EVEN MAKES SENSE! i last updated this... EIGHT MONTHS AGO!), but i have been trying to work on acting on emotional impulses lately. during my daily cry i found all of the inspiration to write the final few paragraphs of this fic, as it tends to happen for any fic that i truly love. it's going to be a little bit off-beat, a little weird, as this fic has always been. and i love it! i hope you love it too.
> 
> this chapter is all about love, growth, and the pursuit of health. special thanks to anyone who has ever loved me... because i understand what love is, now, and for the first time in my life i have accepted that i am loved. it's a crazy feeling.
> 
> i am introducing a new, familiar character into this chapter because i love to start a whole new story at the end of an old, faithful, important one. i can never help myself. also: i feel indebted to this person in many ways, and wanted to introduce them into this story, which is so deeply connected to the rawest parts of me, because imo it's only fair !
> 
> love!

On a steaming hot day near Sacramento, five miles past the city and into the suburban wasteland that so often reminds Katya of where she came from, the thrifted armchair Katya has claimed as her own creaks in the silence of the near-empty living room.

The entire house creaks shamelessly, and Katya should be too young to be able to compare it to her own body, but she is reminded of her cracking hips and elbows every time she climbs the stairs to the bedroom.

The old house looms over the dry yard, the concrete sidewalk up to the porch near rubble. Katya has promised Trixie five times over that she will repair it, once she gets in the mood to get the necessary supplies. She isn’t sure that patching it up will work too well, but figures that Trixie will be happy no matter how awful it looks. She’ll stand over Katya the entire time, press her with questions, if she wants lemonade, if she would come inside for a few minutes and let Trixie touch her sweaty arms and stomach.

The pictures Trixie has hung on the wall, one of the largest being a blown-up version of the only photo they have of Shea and Sasha, have gathered dust in the past few months. Katya could rise and dust them, but she can’t be assed to move even a single foot up from the wood floor. The clock on the mantle ticks away, echoes in the baby pink walls of the living room.

She rubs her hip bones where they stick out from her shorts, grunts at the pressure and throws a forearm across her eyes, sighs. The heat is exhausting, but it’s better than being cold. She vowed that she would remember the freezing winters, whenever she inevitably began complaining about her new life.

She wants to call it _their_ new life, but she figures that it’s just as much her new life as it is Trixie’s. Trixie has started reading self-help books for halting English quotes to throw at Katya whenever she’s feeling down.

The sun is bright, as it always is, the sky is perpetually free of clouds in the way that her peers would talk about America in primary school, whispering about how everyone could have anything they wanted there, that criminals ran free, that the clouds never blocked the sun, and that the people were near barbaric, without rules and with nearly two-hundred flavors of toothpaste.

Now that Katya has been here for three years, she’s found that most all of what they said was true. True enough, at least. She’ll never fit in, and she’ll sure as hell never be able to decide the best flavor of toothpaste. It’s frustrating, thinking that maybe she’s doomed to live in mild confusion for the rest of her life, but she can deal.

She swings her hips upwards and stumbles to the kitchen. One of her legs has fallen asleep, and she taps her toes on the floor as she pours herself a glass of lemonade. She grips the glass with one hand and rubs her calf with the other for a minute, and then meanders back to the front door, walks across the open porch to sit in the rocking chair in the far right corner.

The neighborhood they now live in is a typical family neighborhood. Each house different, but nearly the same, small bikes piled up in every front yard. According to their left-side neighbors, the family that had once lived in Trixie and Katya’s new house had five kids, and had moved further out for even more privacy than is afforded by their sleepy street.

Katya doesn’t mind her new neighbors at all. She’s especially fond of Brian, a flamboyant, witchy gay man with twelve different windchimes on his porch, just off the right side of their home. He rarely waters his potted plants, and doesn’t trim them either, so the leaves cover his windows and vines creep up to the roof. He’ll often smoke with her, walk down barefoot to meet her on the front sidewalk to chat. He calls Katya when he sees that she’s home alone, invites her over for tea or strong, black coffee, insists that she teach him Russian as he lies sprawled over the couch, fan whirring slowly. 

He’s surprisingly proficient at the language, and Katya feels a tiny settling in her chest that blooms when she speaks with him, no matter how rudimentary their conversations are.

She’s settling in, finally, after nearly three whole years of feeling completely lost. Trixie had settled almost immediately, skilled at moving homes, skilled at making homes comfortable, skilled at putting down roots and charming the Californian women at her office job to become fast friends with her. 

Katya hadn’t been jealous- she had hardly minded the loneliness in the beginning. It was just a few more months added onto a lifetime of it, and she had come back into her old habits quickly. It was easy for her to waste days away drinking American beer in the backyard, digging up weeds that Trixie would point out to her before leaving for work, sitting on the lawn chair left behind by the previous owners, bronzing in the sun and wiping sweaty dirt all across her neck and forehead. It had been near-cathartic, making the yard nice for Trixie, digging her a garden, building the outdoor table and chairs.

Brian had inserted himself into her life early on, too. He had come over with bizarre food and had whispered to Katya over lemonade about how she should start up meditation, had insisted that she lie in the grass so he could bend her legs and arms the proper ways to heal her aches and pains. So she was hardly lonely, and Trixie would come home after work and make them dinner, and then she would wrap her arms around Trixie as tightly as possible, take her to bed.

Katya only works part-time at the car shop, there isn’t much to do in such a small suburb beyond what everyone coming from the city needs. She gladly takes the short shifts, works on whatever they need her to until she’s called in again. They have enough money for it, in addition to Trixie’s full-time job. She’s a reliable worker, and has become fast friends with most of the full-time employees. They are young boys that are interested in Russia, want to know everything she remembers about Soviet car models. She’s happy to entertain them.

She ruminates on the cloudless sky from the front porch, lights a cigarette and rocks back and forth. The backs of her knees are already sweating, and she pushes her hair back from her forehead. She hasn’t cut it in three years, and Trixie has chopped her uneven bangs, and Katya doesn’t think that it’ll be long before she gives up and buzzes all of it off again. The white-blonde waves are thick enough to choke her when she doesn’t pull them up, and she only enjoys them to a certain extent. She figures that she felt the same way about her short hair, too. 

She doesn’t much fit in in America- she’s obviously foreign, with her white-blonde hair, sharp cheekbones, and bright green eyes. Her accent is much too thick to buy something at a store without a mishap, and her masculine features don’t make it any better. It could be worse. She can live with it.

“Jesus, it’s hot.” Katya’s neck snaps to the right, nods to Brian as he circles the porch, climbs the front steps with bare feet. His shoulders are sweaty, the giant tattoo of the Virgin Mary across his back is shining in the sunshine.

“You own shoes?” Katya asks scathingly, gestures to his tanned ankles. He shrugs, and Katya figures that’s all she’ll get. He sits in the lawn chair beside her, that he dragged over for this purpose three years ago. The time has passed so quickly, Katya can hardly believe it.

“It’s damn hot. I sweat too much for this heat, and I still live here? Bitch, why am I so fucking stupid? Christ,” Brian lights his cigarette as he speaks, drops his pink lighter on the table between them with a clang. A pickup drives by slowly, the chrome of the door handles shining bright in Katya’s eyes. “You working today?”

Katya shakes her head no, takes a moment of gratitude that he talks enough for the both of them. He has a thin gold necklace on, the little crescent moon charm at the end of it sticks to his bare chest. She knows that somewhere down his back a thin crucifix is hiding, too. He’s wearing a single golden crucifix earring to match. He squirms in his chair. 

“Let’s go somewhere. Let’s get ice cream, or… or, let’s drive to the beach. Oh, can we? When does Trix get back. How _is_ Tracy, anyways? I haven’t seen her in a day.” 

“She’s real good. She’s got a raise now, yesterday, I’m damn proud of her. We’re scheduled to go out to dinner tonight, I’m sure she would like you with us, if you want. Beach too far,” Katya supplies. Brian sighs and turns both shoulders to touch the back of the woven lawn chair. She can hear his skin stick and unstick with sweat. He’s wearing tiny American flag shorts that Katya would honestly love to borrow. It won’t be long before his beard is dripping in sweat and his complaining reaches it’s crescendo.

“When is she off work?” He asks, and Katya shrugs. The conversation should end there, but Brian turns again, ever moving, to face her with his big, green eyes. “Katya.”

“Holy Christ. She’s done at three, but I wanted to fuck her when she got home. Is that good enough answer for you? You happy now?” She grumbles, and his eyes sparkle with joy to match his massive grin.

“I sure am, you fucking dyke. You fuck her, then, but I’m staying here ‘till she drives up that driveway. I’m bored out of my mind without you, and I’m not letting you sit in that house alone.” Katya rolls her eyes at his babysitting, curses the way he sees right through her ‘put-on airs,’ as he once called them. She hates that she relies on him to define more obscure English terms. She hates that he uses them, and that she has to ask him what they mean.

“All right.” Katya replies. He blows smoke in the direction of her face, but she dodges it by turning her head to the side. She hides her smile as he laughs at her, shakes her head as his hot fingers grip her inner elbow. The phone is ringing inside, and Katya sighs again as she stands.

“Katya.” Trixie’s voice is sweet and tired, and Katya places a hand on her stomach the moment she hears it. It’s so easy to relax into Trixie, the impression of her that she leaves on Katya’s body. “How are you?”

She doesn’t speak in Russian when she’s at work, afraid that it’ll get her in suspicion with her boss, or that she’ll be fired, or that she’ll be seen as lesser than she already is, as an immigrant. Katya will humor her wishes until the end of time, despite how they break her heart.

“I’m okay, I’ve been sitting outside. Brian wanted to go to beach, I invited him to dinner instead,” Trixie hums in agreement. Katya props a hip against the counter, scratches the side of her face. A bead of sweat drips down her nose, and she tears off a paper towel to blot her forehead.

“That’ll be nice. Tell him I say hello and tell him he’ll have to be out of there once I get home, da?” Katya bites her bottom lip in a grin at the Russian slipping in, at the allusion to Katya’s fingers inside her, at the dreamy heat that’s making Katya’s ear drip against the phone.

“I already did!” Trixie giggles quietly, Katya figures that everyone is out of the office for lunch but she’s still being careful. Katya loves her.

Trixie works in immigration, and her job mostly consists of sorting papers and filing documents but Katya is immensely proud of her, anyways. She goes to meetings in San Francisco, sometimes, and Katya has come along once. They had visited a lesbian bar, and Katya hadn’t much cared for it. Trixie had gotten incredibly drunk, and Katya had needed to call a taxi to bring them back to the hotel.

Katya loves American drinks. The vodka in the cupboard isn’t replaced new nearly as much as it once was, back home, because Trixie will buy her beer every week. Katya loves whiskey, loves Trixie pouring her a glass after a long day at work the same way she would give her vodka to placate her joint pain. 

Brian tries to get her interested in martinis and other pink beverages he conjures up in his kitchen, the rims of the glass sparkling and stuck with limes. She doesn’t hate them, but part of her love affair with hard alcohol is directly related to the burn, the growing heat in her stomach. He can bemoan her existence for as long as he wants, and she’ll still bring a case of beer and a bottle of whiskey to their sleepovers, when Trixie is off on business trips.

They always fall asleep plastered on Brian’s bed, and Katya will wake up with his sharp nose in her armpit. It’s always sticky, and smelly, and she always regrets it. But she’ll come back, if only for how he chatters on charmingly, words slurring more and more as the night goes on. He’s the nicest person she’s ever met.

Katya thinks that vodka is full of too many memories to swallow. She likes the memories she has made in California, and would much rather call upon them when drinking. This is usually the point where Trixie snaps that maybe she should stop altogether, running Katya out of the room with her concerned, wrinkled forehead.

“I’ll be home at 2:30. I told them I have to leave early,” Trixie whispers. Katya snorts into the receiver.

“Of course you did. Okay, I see you then. I love you,” Katya rumbles. Her voice drops around Trixie, and it gets Trixie quiet and respectful quite fast. 

“I love you, too. Bye bye,” Trixie hangs up. Katya assumes that everyone has come back from lunch, that Trixie slammed the phone into the base as soon as the door to the office opened. Katya wishes they could work on her paranoia without Trixie rolling her eyes and denying it, every single time Katya brings it up.

She exits the house to Brian lifting the rocking chair down onto the dry, scratchy grass to sit aside his lawn chair. She knew he would do this, pull them into the sun to work on his tan, without a care for her hatred of the heat. He smirks and wiggles his toes as he sits and yanks his tiny shorts further up his thighs.

“I can see your dick,” Katya says. She keeps the low, pissed tone that works so well with Trixie, but it just prompts him to laugh at her. 

He twists his necklace around to dangle down his tattooed back and closes his eyes. She sighs, closes her own, and before she knows it she is asleep in the hot sun, dreaming of touching Trixie with warm hands, when she comes home with crumpled, air-conditioned clothes from work.

“Bitch,” something drips onto her ear, a cold hand squeezes her shoulder. She lifts a heavy arm to wipe her eyes of sweat, and opens them through a crack in her fingers to Brian’s nose and head blocking out the sun. “Wake up. Trixie’s here now, you’re all burnt.”

Katya attempts to sit up, but is instantly aching from the sunburn all along her legs and chest. She wants to scream at Brian for not waking her earlier, but instead glares him down as he shuffles back over to his own house, waving carelessly behind him.

The dry grass beneath her feet pokes her as she makes her way to the sidewalk, and she enters the cooler house with a sigh of relief. She can hear Trixie fumbling around in the kitchen, is immediately calmed by the sound and the knowledge that she can speak her native tongue without thinking, in her own home.

“Trixie,” she calls, and Trixie hums quietly in response. Half of the windows are wide open, and Katya wants to get her upstairs where the neighbors can’t hear.

Trixie is standing at the sink, washing her hands. Her long blonde hair, that she hasn’t cut since that drastic chop years ago, is twisted into a loose braid down her back, the end of it resting on the top of the wide curve of her ass in her denim shorts.

She’s changed in the time it’s taken Brian to wake Katya, into a tiny yellow tank top and the denim shorts that she’ll never wear out of the house, cut off so that the bottom of her ass hangs out of them. Katya can feel drool collecting in her mouth at the sight, her overheated, stinging limbs begging for relief.

Trixie tuns once she’s dried her hands off on the little white towel, she’s braless and her tiny baby curls are framing her flushed cheeks delicately. Her skin is greasy and sweaty from the drive home, and her mascara is pooled up under her eyes. Katya bites her bottom lip.

“I had a long day. I couldn’t wait to get home to you. I wanted you so bad when I left, you looked so concerned in your sleep. I wanted you to yell at me to take the day off and then tie me up, touch me everywhere before you let me come-”

“Shut up,” Katya breaks off her monologue. Trixie’s hands gripping the counter are all that’s holding her up, her feet turn in and her knees collapse at the command. Katya likes how tight her shorts are on her pussy. Katya steps forwards to her, pulls her damp tank top off as she crosses the kitchen floor. 

She can hear Trixie whimper as Katya rubs up and down her burnt biceps gingerly. She hisses, feeling how hot they are to the touch. Trixie reaches out a hand as Katya nears her, grips her shoulder tighter than necessary.

“Fuck. Let go of that. I’m smarting all over, you can’t touch me. Turn around, now-”

Trixie releases Katya’s arm and spins quickly, always such a good listener, always so proud to be doing Katya good.

“Wait. Kiss me,” Katya decides. Trixie giggles and spins again, twists to meet Katya’s lips and brings a still-damp hand to squeeze her left breast. Katya gently pulls her fingers from around her nipple, even with how it’s causing sharp, hot stings to travel through her stomach. Trixie’s mouth is cool around Katya’s hot tongue, and Trixie is the first to pull back as Katya becomes carried away in the smooth feel of her lips and teeth.

“Fuck me, you promised.” Trixie punctuates her words with another twist to lean over the counter, brace her elbows on the countertop. From where they are both situated, they can see out of the open window into the backyard. Katya hopes that the couple next door are still at work. 

“Okay. Patience is a virtue,” Katya mumbles in English. It’s a phrase she learned from dealing with angry customers. It causes Trixie to whimper and shift her hips against the sharp edge of the counter. The birds are chirping loudly outside. Everything is still, except for Trixie’s hips moving back and forth beneath Katya’s hands.

“Katya,” Trixie sighs. Katya breathes into her, kisses her stomach again and again and again.

-

At Trixie’s promotion celebration dinner, she wears the same tank top she wore in the kitchen. Katya tries not to drool across the bench, and Brian presses his fingers jokingly into Trixie’s hickeys, so that she elbows him in the side.

They’ve given Katya her own side of the bench, because Brian wants to dote on Trixie. He rummages in her purse for a mirror to check the state of the peeling sunburn on his nose. Katya rolls her eyes, and Trixie’s foot bumps her ankle beneath the table.

Katya orders steak, and the other two order salads. Brian makes Katya swear that she’ll allow him to pay for dessert, and Katya steals bites of Trixie’s salad when she isn’t looking. She’s worn out from the prolonged kitchen fucking, which Brian complained loudly about hearing all of in the passenger seat, on the drive over. Katya had plugged his nose to stop him.

Trixie is squirming, Katya knows it’s from her wide palm on her soft ass. Katya wishes she was home with Trixie in bed, but the soft lighting of the restaurant causes Trixie to glow beautifully, and she’s thoroughly enjoying the attention. Katya can drag herself out to places she hardly enjoys for Trixie, especially now that everything seems easier, a weight lifted off of the both of them.

Katya has a newfound interest in nearly everything. In Trixie, how she’s gained weight from American food and how her hair shines from all of this water she’s been drinking. In nature, following Brian up and down on hike after hike. She has a newfound appreciation for cars, and a genuine excitement to go into work every day. Living in America is a thousand times harder, but it’s also so much easier, and Katya finds herself looking across the dark wood table at Trixie and Brian and feeling her throat clog, her eyes sting.

Brian reaches across to pinch her cheek, but Katya knows that Trixie doesn’t see that she’s crying. Trixie is still giggling at one of Brian’s whispered jokes, and Katya watches her braided hair shine in the light as she lowers her head to take another bite.

Sometimes Katya wants to know how Brian can cheer Trixie up when she can’t, but she’s mostly grateful for him, anyways. He asks Trixie over and over if she wants them to sing a celebration song for her, becoming more and more insistent as she continues to decline, and then orders three slices of fudge cake. Katya doesn’t want to cry, but she’s being tested by Trixie’s pride at her promotion and Brian’s doting on her.

“I miss you everyday, Trix. I’m so proud of you,” Brian is saying around a forkful of food. Trixie smiles close-mouthed back, cheeks reddening, and Katya swallows a grunt. “We both are. You work so hard.”

Katya doesn’t know when she and Brian became a “we,” but she’s grateful for the support. She reaches across the table to grip Trixie’s hand, ignores the fat tear that finally escapes her eye and tracks down the side of her nose, falling on the table. Trixie laughs at her, making her sob and laugh back.

Katya isn’t allowed to dwell on the past the way she used to. Trixie insists on it often, whenever Katya gets nervous and begins apologizing for everything all over again. Trixie locks the alcohol cabinet and Katya tries not to get angry and prove her point, and she sits down with her on the couch until Katya is all cried out. 

She isn’t allowed to dwell on the past, because Trixie is positive that she’s been completely forgiven. Trixie believes that Katya’s mother is watching down on her, and that she is both sorry and proud. Katya feels less so that way, but she can’t deny how it comforts her when Trixie says so. Trixie also whispers to her that she forgives her, too, and Katya hopes that it’s real, that she could really make amends to Trixie the right way. 

Brian yells at her whenever she is a mopey drunk at his house, and Katya had only gotten away with yelling back that maybe she doesn’t deserve to be happy once. He had forced her into a shower and put her to bed, and Katya had slept the hardest she ever has.

Brian feeds Trixie a bite of cake and Katya watches as she wipes her eyes, relaxes her tense shoulders like Brian has taught her. Brian has harped on and on about mindfulness and self care to her so often that she’s begun doing it unconsciously. Trixie smiles at her and Katya feels herself calm down further. 

When they are all in the car, on the way back home, Trixie reaches to the front seat to crank up the radio and scream along gibberish to the English pop hits that she doesn’t know. She holds Katya’s shifting hand, and her thumb digs between Katya’s tendons, rubbing over her veins. Katya’s cigarette hangs out of her mouth until Brian steals it, and Katya pulls into the driveway feeling full, of food and of some kind of comfort that she’s only ever felt here.

Katya knows that she’s acting off, and she wants to cry for how Trixie and Brian take it in stride. Trixie pulls Katya onto her lap on the couch, begins running her fingers through her hair as Brian puts on music. 

Katya comes back to them from her warm space on Trixie’s lap as she lights another cigarette and sprawls out on the floor, yelling along to the tunes that Brian always plays when she is over. He attempted to teach her the words, but she’s content to babble in English-sounding syllables like Trixie until the day she dies. Poetry will never be as beautiful in English as it is in Russian, anyways.

The living room gets hazy with smoke, and Trixie and Katya finish an entire bottle of red wine before the sun goes down. They leave Brian on the couch to sleep, and stumble up the stairs to fall into bed. 

“Trixie, Trixie,” Katya mumbles as Trixie strips for bed. Katya is lying on the bed naked, unsure of how she ended up there in what seems like no time. Trixie turns, messy hair falling over one shoulder. 

“Hmmm?” Trixie responds. She stares out of the window for a moment, almost basking in her own satisfaction, and then joins Katya in bed. “What?”

Katya groans as Trixie leans her elbow into her stomach, pointy bone digging into Katya’s flesh. Trixie mumbles an _oops_ and scoots to the side. Katya wraps her arms around her, despite the oppressive heat that is still spilling through the open window, has been all day long. Trixie hums contentedly and Katya sighs into her hair.

“I love you,” Katya whispers, and Trixie relaxes more on top of her, groggy with the weather and Katya’s hands on her. “I’m very proud of you.”

“Thank you. I love you too,” Trixie says. Katya feels her falling asleep, and tries to breathe in the same rhythm, to get one more moment connected to her before she inevitably rolls off to her side of the bed.

-

Katya wakes to Brian gone, and Trixie still sleeping soundly beside her. The window is still wide open, there is no more cooler air to trap inside, so Katya leaves it.

At some point, Katya will be much older, and she will still make breakfast for Trixie every morning, so long as Trixie wants her to. Today she warms some croissants that they’ve had on the counter for a day or two, pours Trixie orange juice. As she’s waiting for the microwave to beep, Brian knocks on the back screen door, arms full of boxes from his garage.

“What,” Katya states. He shoulders his way inside, drops the boxes on the table- something clanking inside- and leans against the counter.

“I’m making lemonade, if you want any later. I’ll be in the yard all day, so please take your pretty woman by the hand and guide her my way. I have all sorts of shit to do and I think that you both would be the perfect helpers,” he babbles. Katya nods absentmindedly and hears Trixie waking upstairs at the noise.

Brian lifts the boxes again and swipes an orange from the counter. When he leaves, Trixie comes down naked, hair falling all across her body. Trixie stands beside her at the counter and eats her breakfast, looks out of the open window at the dry, brown grass, the birds trying to find something to eat to no avail. Katya wonders about the merits of a bird feeder.

Two hours later and Trixie is lying in Brian’s blue kiddie pool, slathered in sunscreen, half asleep. Katya is on her hands and knees, washing rocks and crystals with gloves and a toothbrush, and Brian has disappeared into the house to do God knows what. The heat is making waves in the air in front of her, and she wipes her forehead with her dirty forearm to swipe it dry of sweat. Trixie’s hands are pulling up grass lazily, and Katya resists the urge to tell her off for not helping.

“Girls! More lemonade,” Brian calls. Katya hates him, but she takes her glass. 

“How long?” She asks. He scratches his beard and rubs his shoulders before sitting beside her. They must make a pretty picture, her sweaty bra and shorts sticking to her skin and the ridiculousness of the Madonna drawn all over him, scrubbing rocks clean of dirt. 

“Whenever they’re done,” he finally replies. Katya groans again, shakes her head. Once she finishes dusting off a big, pink crystal, she pulls her denim shorts off and sits herself down on Trixie’s lap in the pool. The water is lukewarm, but refreshing, and Trixie kisses her hard the moment she gets settled.

Trixie’s lips are covered in some kind of cherry lip gloss. Her hair is so bleached from the sun, and her skin is so tan and freckled, that she looks like a real proper American woman. Her breasts have grown a full size, and Katya had gone from store to store with her to try and find the perfect, sexy swimsuit.

She has the same tiny gold hoop earrings, that were her mother’s and probably her grandmother’s before her, and Katya touches them with wet fingers as they kiss. She absorbs all of Trixie’s lipgloss and grabs her tits so that she squeals and Brian complains loudly.

“You aren’t tan enough already?” Katya jokes, and pokes Trixie’s soft cheek. Trixie kisses her in avoidance, and Katya relishes the warmth of both of their sweaty bodies up against each other. Trixie is so soft and squeaky with the water, and Katya loves her steady presence. 

Katya’s life hasn’t changed drastically, as she had imagined it would. Back home, with clouded judgement, she had placed America on a pedestal that would solve everything, heal her wounds, cause her grief to vanish. America has not done any of it, but Katya’s life has settled. Her mind is clearer, the sunshine has changed her, and the grass beneath her hands, the nonexistent winter, the warm water and the hot concrete has fixed her like a compass onto health. 

Katya’s mind feels hollow, waiting for knowledge and joy and years ahead with Trixie, new friends and hope. Never perfection. The constant depression that followed her from home, the tiny apartment, to work, the sprawling factory, the field outside, the deep winters, the frosted window of their little bedroom, lessens every moment she realizes that she is freer than she has ever been before. Not free of her own thoughts, dark ones that take her clunkily through her childhood and adulthood, through tragedy and emptiness, but free of facing those reminders every moment. 

Katya feels free, to grow bigger and stronger in the heavy heat, to love and to truly appreciate nature, to plant vegetables in the backyard garden and speak to them gruffly as she smokes in the mornings. Free to encourage Trixie, to amuse Brian, to listen to her body when it hurts, to give herself a break. Katya has never felt lenient before, and now knows the English word like the back of her hand. L. e. n. i. e. n. t. She spells it in the dark of her big bedroom now, Trixie snoozing by her side. Lenient. Bendable. Flexible. Alive. 

Katya has never allowed herself to change, and now even believing that change is possible in her current age has forced her emotional capabilities forwards by miles. Katya cries sometimes, seated on the kitchen floor, just to cry. Brian says that she cries for hours to make up for lost cry-time, from when she was too young and alone to allow herself to do so. Katya was never a child, Brian insists, and Katya has finally understood what he means. 

Trixie kisses both of Katya’s cheeks, and as Katya extracts herself to lie in the grass, Trixie rests a damp foot on her stomach, to prompt a foot rub. Katya does so, allows the emotions that a hot summer day, surrounded by people who love you very much, tend to encourage. She feels the appreciation bubble up in her throat, and closes her eyes as the tears begin to sting. She can feel every single dry blade of grass pressing into her sunburnt skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you!!!!!!


End file.
